Ethical Icon: Sustainable Shopping Aggregator
Building a transparent online shopping experience connecting customers directly with the brands they love.
Introduction
Ethical Icon’s mission is to make awareness, education, and advocacy for sustainable products simple. They envision a world where the global clothing supply chain is 100% transparent through ongoing sustainability advocacy.
Problem
While online shopping is convenient and ubiquitous, consumers still find it challenging to shop ethically. As an organization is in its startup infancy stages of establishing product market fit, it was important to tackle the following obstacles:
Understand the online shopping sustainable industry as a whole.
Map the basic requirements of a successful MVP website for this specific problem space and customer.
Provide data-driven suggestions to differentiate from the existing and extensive competitive market.
Not a great sign when users don’t ultimately know where to start when looking for sustainable goods.
Illustration by Lili Bustos.
Solution
The result was to build a website experience that offers: An online marketplace that links out to products directly, as well as an aggregator of sustainability information. This solution is anchored around showcasing brands front and center closer to the consumer, using third-party certifications, working on advocacy tied with social proof, and building internal transparent labels to categorize the best sustainable products shoppers can purchase in minutes.
My contribution was supporting that the design and research team’s product contributions were based on research, data-driven analysis, as well as translating found industry insights across branding, visual design, and prototyping for this MVP launch.
Logistics
Team
2 UX Researchers
2 Product Designers
1 Business Development
3 Engineers
3 Marketing
1 Founder
Timeframe
October - December, 2020
My role
Research
UX Strategy
Branding
Visual Design
Prototyping
Design Process
The design of the first phase of this MVP followed traditional methods of design thinking, combined with the lean startup process and agile mode. I primarily wore a product designer hat and worked across various teams between business development, marketing, and design & research. Through the design process, we had multiple weekly meetings to ensure alignment as well as appropriate delivery of milestones.
Research
To kickstart this project our team focused on conducting a main user survey to bring research, customer, and product insights up to date due to the impacts of Covid-19 in the industry and problem space.
Parallel to the survey, I conducted extensive online shopping research to understand the existing online sustainable shopping landscape and mapped out the different types of businesses, corporations, and allies in this space.
Learn
After mapping out the online shopping web of products, it was time to learn and identify market advantages and recognize important competitive attributes in the industry.
I created research tools using Excel and Miro to conduct both quantitative and qualitative studies to recognize data-based findings, insights, and recommendations for the MVP development.
Sketch
It was time to translate research into design, while wireframing prototypes to build the website presence. I focused on the top sections of the landing page navigation, as well as the pop-up search bars, and the product collection page.
I quickly discerned the basic requirements every successful landing navigation page ought to include, and recognized ways to deliver a more robust product that prioritizes brand and material on the search sections.
Solutions
In the process of brainstorming Ethical Icon’s brand, it was important to establish guidelines, a color palette, typography, and imagery to amplify the brand's voice. I worked alongside the team’s visual designer to deliver a standardized playbook for designers to reference across the product.
In parallel, I created high-fidelity prototypes of an ideal website for Ethical Icon. In this iteration, I brought together all the insights from building previous wireframes, lo-fi prototypes, and feedback from usability tests during the user interviews.
Next steps
After observing the extensive and complex landscape of online sustainable shopping, we are faced with an important question, where do we go from here?
As a team, we came together to brainstorm immediate, medium, and long-term actions and feature recommendations for a product roadmap to build a more sustainable and transparent online shopping experience. In addition, I highlighted important insights and recommendations for any sustainable products and organizations to consider.
