Uniqlo

Table of Content

Overview

The UNIQLO App Redesign project aims at enhancing the overall user experience of the official UNIQLO app, which currently suffers from an overwhelming design and subpar user interface. This initiative seeks to address these shortcomings and elevate the app's usability, ensuring a more seamless and enjoyable shopping experience for users.
With an user-centered design approach, this project delves into extensive primary research to gather actionable insights directly from real users. By understanding their preferences, behaviors, and challenges, I aim to inform the redesign of the app's structure, aesthetics, and functionality. This foundational work ensures that the resulting design solutions resonate with users, fostering a more user-friendly and engaging interface.

Role & Responsibilities

As the product designer, I take the project's research initiatives and the development of design. I conducted and analyzed user research, developed low-fidelity and high-fidelity mockups, and organized user testing. My goal is to seamlessly merge functionality with aesthetics, resulting in an enhanced UNIQLO app that exceeds user expectations and elevates the overall shopping experience.

Tools & Methods

Methods: User Interviews & Surveys, Competitive Analysis, Persona Development, Task Analysis, Future Prioritisation
Tools: Figma, Sketching, Survey Tools

Value Proposition

Initiated by the dissatisfaction with the original app's crowded and non-user-friendly design, the UNIQLO App Redesign Project aimed to rectify the malfunctioning product catalog and layout issues that hindered a seamless experience for UNIQLO users.

Streamlined Usability: The redesign tackled critical usability challenges, simplifying navigation and reducing task completion times by decluttering the interface and organizing information intuitively.
Enhanced Accessibility: Adjustments to the color scheme and layout, including alleviating the strain caused by the footer color, expanded accessibility for a broader audience, especially users with visual impairments.
Reinforced Brand Identity: The project established a more robust homepage identity and maintained a consistent brand aesthetic, contributing to a cohesive and recognizable user experience.

Problem Statement

How might we create a more intuitive and simpler shopping experience for UNIQLO app users?

User Research & Surveys

In an exhaustive user research initiative, we distributed a questionnaire to over 100 random users of the UNIQLO app, seeking insights into their most frequent app usage. An intriguing revelation emerged, indicating that a significant portion of users predominantly deploy the app while in-store.
Whether influenced by app-related issues or other factors, this finding underscores the importance of emphasizing an in-store scenario in the redesign. To substantiate our insights, the forthcoming design will take the form of a lite version of the original app, ensuring a responsive and user-friendly experience that aligns with the observed usage patterns of UNIQLO customers.

Engagement with Online Shopping: 24% of the participants browse the app for new styles, while only 15% actually buy products from the app, indicating a low engagement with online retail.
In-person Shopping Habits: 52% of respondents shared that they typically use the app to browse in-store coupons and products or to search for first-time customer discount, highlighting a significant interest in in-person shopping experience.

Competitive Analysis

The competitive analysis offered critical insights into best practices and areas for improvement by examining leading platforms in the giant fashion retail names. Key observations include:

Zara: Immersive integration of both online and in-person shopping experience into the application with a clean, minimal interface.
H&M: Praised for its simple layout and well-formatted categories and filters, which contains just enough information to be effective without overwhelming users.
Banana Republic: Noted for having a simple yet consistent brand style across its website, app, and stores, contributing to a cohesive user experience.

These insights informed my decisions to redesign UNIQLO app with a more minimal, clean interface with a focus on in-store shopping experience.

Design Direction

Secondary Menu Button: The menu button in Material Design is a great inspiration during the process, even the app itself is not entirely using Material Design as its visual language. Not only because of the menu button's design is a great use of one-hand touch comfort zone, but also because of that it keeps reminding the user where they are and ensures a quick switch between pages can be done at a very fast pace. This button also ensures the continuity of the entire system because a little dot can be literally used for all purposes just by changing its icon and color, reminding the user where to go next with the visual hierarchy and animation between pages.

Hierarchy: Based on researches on other fashion shopping apps and websites like Urban Outfitters, ZARA, FARFETCH, and H&M, most of them are mainly focused on online shopping experiences. Thus most of them look merely like a product catalog, which is not what customers want when shopping in person.
For the in-store shopping scenario, a clear shopping guide and content hierarchy is absolutely needed, because most customers don't come to a UNIQLO branch with a clear shopping list of what to buy. Usually, most people just randomly go inside and browse what they like while UNIQLO doesn't give any style advice both online and offline.