With the continual rise of e-commerce, consumerism is sustaining the exponentially growing issue of extreme packaging waste. Especially in industries like online fast fashion, this packaging waste highly frustrates consumers while dangerously threatens the planet.

Through various research methods, insights of high packaging waste annoyance and packaging aesthetic apathy led Packed to develop a plug-in service solution. After iterations of user testing feedback, a high fidelity interactive mockup was then formed from the cumulative insights.

A plug-in service that groups fashion shoppers of the same brand in the same area into joint orders, allowing for packaging consolidation and discount sharing while benefiting the environment, consumer, community, and business.

Design Lead - Juliana Sampaio

Project Lead - Cherie Chung

Research Lead - Laura Ford

generative research

interview & user testing facilitating

story boarding

wireframing & prototyping

UI design & content strategy

visual design of deliverables

In this phase of secondary and primary research, we soon saw a major recurring issue: packaging waste. Specifically, this packaging waste was largely caused by online shopping-fast fashion to be exact. This pain point identified that with the rise of digital shopping, consumerism generates an extremely dangerous amount of waste that is not beneficial to consumers or to the planet. In fact, we found that over half of online shoppers considered their packaging to be wasteful. After several contextual inquiry studies at mail and garbage centers, 89 survey responses, and 5 user interviews, we had many data points to affinity map.

After going through the affinity mapping process, my team and I found that most online shoppers would sacrifice the timeliness of their delivery in order to aid the environment. Additionally, one of our major insights claimed that branding on the packaging was often ignored, and superfluous additions to the packaging like tissue or confetti were just bothersome. Then when looking into their shopping habits, we found that most leave items in their cart because they are waiting on a reason to make the purchase, like a justification from friends or a time constraint due to a sale.

How might we keep “adding to cart” beneficial for consumers and businesses?

How might we keep online shopping affordable?

How might we maintain a pleasurable online shopping experience?

How might we keep online shopping convenient and easy?

How might we make the online shopping experience environmentally friendly?

How might we keep the focus of packaging on the item itself?

After several rounds of ideation and projections on a feasibility chart, we landed on an initial concept that utilizes the frequency and community of shopping: Packed is a plug-in service that connects shoppers with others buying from the same online fashion brands, delivering to the same area, to centralize orders into one order based on geography.

For instance, if I was buying a top from ASOS, Packed would detect the three other shoppers in my city that also had items in their cart. A prompt would suggest that I volunteer to do a group order with those shoppers. It would give a retainer time until the order is processed so all shoppers could complete their order. A 'Host' would volunteer to receive and redistribute the package. This person would have a secured package address and would get a discount for the next shopping order she partakes in since she will be contacting the other shoppers for pickup. This method would capitalize on this generations' sharing comfort while decimating packages' wasted space.

We ran this idea and started making the app's low-fi wireframes via paper prototyping. We user-tested these designs and got a lot of feedback on the interaction model that Packed relied on. We translated these changes into mid-fi and then hi-fi designs, prototyping them to user-test with. We additionally iterated after a heuristic evaluation.

Through various research methods, insights of high packaging waste annoyance and packaging aesthetic apathy led Packed to develop a plug-in service solution. A plug-in service that groups fashion shoppers of the same brand in the same area into joint orders, allowing for packaging consolidation and discount sharing while benefiting the environment, consumer, community, and business.

At the end of our project we produced many deliverables. One thing was was important to us was to produce all the real life incentive to download the plug in. So we designed stickers, tote bags, notebooks and more. Attached bellow are all our deliverables.