Levi’s: Reuse & Recycling
TACKLING TEXTILE WASTE THROUGH CREATING REAL CONNECTIONS WITH CUSTOMERS
Brief
Digital design project focusing on user experience research and visual UI prototyping
Links
View the Slide deck
Role
Visual Design, User Experience, Interaction Design, Wireframing, Research
Tools
Illustrator, Figma, Keynote, Protopie
Teams
Project cooperated with Dalia Alahmad, Jenny Ho, John Latay, Katherine Kim, and Karen Lim
Business problem
Levi Strauss & Co are renowned for their denims. They’re crafted with care, using quality materials grown and stitched together, and “made to last.” But what do you do with the old, stained denim? What happens when those jeans don’t fit in anymore? Where do they go when they’ve been forgotten and out of style? Even with the recycling efforts today, 10 million tonnes of textile waste still ends up in a landfill every year in the United States alone.
How We Are Measuring Success
Goal: Story Telling Goals + Hidden Stories
The goal of this project is to close the innovation gap between what Levi’s is encouraging for, and customers’ online + offline experiences while clarifying the questions they have had.
The goal of our team is not to solve the problem of textile landfills, but we are to lead customers of Levi’s to be aware of their existing program by creating an extended story of jeans to show all progresses of Levi’s, and by leveraging their hidden stories in the website. My group decided to have Levi’s as our client to leverage sustainable programs that customers are desperate to know, and to get rid of all unnecessary steps for acquiring information.
Process: Testing Prototype
My team and I created an initial prototype and tested it with 4 different Levi’s customers whom had either little to extensive experience with recycling programs.
After the test, the insights we gained helped us to improve narrowing the problem down more on each prototypes and cleared our assumptions. The initial structure and prototype we created was hard to find the information needed even thought we thought we have leveraged all information to the front.
So I extended my research on other competitors who are fronting their ethical and sustainable views of their companies to create better visual directions and clear user experience with interfaces.
Prototype: Finalized design prototypes
Opportunity : Levi’s Long Year Program
Levi’s has been collaborating with sustainable companies such as Re/Done and I:Collect to reduce textile landfills. The company has collected used denims from customers to create new denim products to become another sustainable company. However, my team and I found out that even with Levi’s efforts on creating ethical company, most of customers (97%) did not know about their recycling program that has been served for years.
Insight: Understanding the Audience
Our team focused and developed on the persona who has a basic knowledge and do care about products that are created sustainably, ethically, and are very cautious of making right decisions. By having interviews with people who are into sustainable clothing programs, we found out that one of the biggest concerns of them are finding information of clothing companies by going through long posts or lots of reports that are not engaging to read. This gave us an idea of creating a product that is more engaging, and informative for customers to find an ethical company that suits them.
Process: Visual Language And Identity
My role for this project was visual director and user experience designer. I have made design choices in the boundary of Levi’s style guide to keep the consistency, and have decided to make the flow clear and informative for the website visitors. The voice of the content are meant to relate customers to their own denim products, to emphasize their products, and to make right decisions for their old products that might be part of textile landfill problem.
Process: Initial Low To Medium Fidelity Mockups
The progress of creating low to medium fidelity mockups was very fun and interesting to consider about the customers’ engagements. During this progress, I focused a lot on the customers’ experience and a draft of visual direction details we had to consider to keep the company’s identity
Process: Testing Prototype
BIG PROBLEM & BRIEF SOLUTION
Information of the context of the issue and solution that is brief and direct. Customers who are inclined to donate want to validate that Levi's is aware of the situation and what they offer.
MAP & CURATED STORIES
Addressing where and how the initiative has made an impact in the world through curated stories. Knowing where the donation is repurposed allows customers to trust the client more.
Re/Done & I:COLLECT PARTNERS
Ensuring that content is upfront and useful for the customer. We want to answer their most important questions, what is the program, who is involved, and where do donations.
PROVIDING CONTEXT THROUGH STORYTELLING
The solution provides the customer with a story in which they can relate to personally. This would empower Levi’s goals while customers can understand the whole process of Levi’s recycling process at the same time
SIMPLE LEADING STEPS FOR CUSTOMERS
This quick and short information is provided for customers who have been wondering about the sustainable program by Levi’s. We put this step after detailed information to target customers’ curiosity to be part of the program.
Reflection
The experience of working on this project has taught me the power of the interaction between storytelling and visuals to create an impact. This project had a hail of different values and contents we would like to share to Levi’s customers, since they could have leveraged existing programs and hidden stories that could be so valuable for audiences.
This gave us a chance to turn the challenge into an opportunity. By focusing heavy content and topic of global issues towards a journey of jeans with storytelling, it led us to approach audiences more easily. From this, I learnt that rather than trying to hide serious or heavy topics, we can shorten that content with honesty and clear thoughts. In so doing, we bring them up front and communicate with audiences which the viewers appreciate.