altar’d state
overview
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Personal Project
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April 2022 – May 2022
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Visual Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping, UX Design
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Figma
“Our mission is to serve as an inspiration, empower others, and give more than we receive. We do this by lifting those who need a helping hand, volunteering our time to enrich lives, and extending the power of prayer.”
— Altar’d State Website
user research
At the time that I decided to design this app, I was working at Altar’d State as a Brand Representative. During my time working there, I observed several issues that I thought could be effectively addressed with a mobile app, which the brand did not currently have at the time. I also spoke with many regular customers that loved the brand and its mission but felt like there were several small problems that negatively affected their shopping experiences. Because of this, I decided to design a mobile app for Altar’d State to potentially combat some of these issues.
identified problems
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One thing that I noticed when interacting with customers at work is that many of them were confused about the rewards program. The policy during that time was that customers would automatically be signed up for the rewards program when they made a purchase of $100 or more, and they would then receive 10% off of subsequent purchases for the rest of the year.
In my opinion, this wasn’t a very user-friendly program because the computer system could not be relied on to give the discount automatically. Also, many customers either wouldn’t be able to remember if they were signed up already or would think that they were signed up but be unable to find the email in their inbox when asked to provide proof.
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Additionally, situations would often arise where customers would want to look up certain items online while they were shopping in-store, and because there was no mobile app, they would have to use the mobile version of the Altar’d State website to do this. This made on-the-go browsing more difficult than it needed to be.
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Altar’d State’s mission to make charitable contributions to various causes around the world and to provide a safe space for customers to submit prayer requests is extremely important to this company. However, many customers that I spoke to were unaware of this mission and wanted to know more about it when I mentioned it to them. Other customers were interested to learn about the charitable impact that they had personally made through shopping at Altar’d State.
This gave me the idea to add a feature to the mobile app that would allow customers to learn more about the brand’s mission, visualize their personal contributions to charity, and submit prayer requests.
design strategy
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As someone who loves fashion and shopping, one thing that I’ve noticed is that all of my favorite brands have mobile apps, and whenever I shop online, I prefer to use apps over websites. Mobile apps are typically set up in a way that make it easy to browse and view different items from a phone screen, and I do most of my shopping from my phone rather than my computer because I often shop when I’m out and about.
Therefore, I designed the Altar’d State app to allow for easy, on-the-go shopping by sizing everything to fit a mobile screen and including a way for users to select a category at the top of the browsing page.
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One of my favorite aspects of shopping apps is that they encourage users to sign in to their personal accounts. Users can then keep track of their favorite items and save information such as their preferred payment method and shipping address.
This allows users to receive personalized recommendations and creates an easier shopping experience, which is another reason why I believe that Altar’d State’s customers would appreciate having the option to shop using a mobile app.
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Having the option to sign in to their accounts on a mobile app would also allow users to view their current rewards, which would eliminate the need for customers to have to look for an email to prove that they are part of the rewards program.
I was also inspired to restructure the rewards program as I was designing this section of the app. Because many customers would not want to spend $100 in a single purchase to unlock access to the rewards program, I thought that it would be better if all customers were able to sign up automatically and then receive points towards different rewards with each purchase. I felt like adding a points system would gamify the rewards program and therefore inspire customers to shop more often.
Urban Outfitters does an excellent job of this, and this change was inspired by my experience shopping on their mobile app. The UO mobile app also has a rewards barcode that customers can scan to automatically connect their account with their in-store purchases, which is another feature that I was inspired to add to my design.
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Because Altar’d State is a give-back company that donates a portion of their proceeds to charity on Mondays, I wanted customers to be able to see their charitable contributions and feel good about their decision to shop at Altar’d State. Therefore, I included a “Give” section in my design so that customers would be able to visualize this information.
final designs
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Shop
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Rewards
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Give
prototype demo
user testing
In order to validate my designs, I asked four customers and two coworkers to watch my prototype video and give me feedback on the three screens that I created. Overall, the feedback that I received was very positive. Users enjoyed the visual design of the app and found it easy to navigate. They also liked the ability to earn rewards points and visualize their current donations to charity.
suggestions for improvement
A few users stated that they had a little bit of trouble reading both the smaller text and the large cursive font, so if I were to continue working on this design I would experiment with a different font choice and larger text sizes. One user also stated that they would be interested in seeing which charities they had donated to in addition to the amount of money they had donated.