Product Design: Personal Shopper

Overview

PIYH is an app that helps consumers find, organize and locate outfits within malls close to them. It is an easy to use React Native app that gives the user an online shopping experience while merging it with an instant gratification of being able to pick up merchandise in-store.

Mission Statement: Instant gratification for online shopping. We bring an easier way to browse for outfits with items selected just for you. PIYH is your personal shopper.

Research

After searching for mall specific apps that allow for multiple store shopping what I found was quite interesting. I found there were apps for each store and for each mall, but nothing that combined the two. On websites, they had the ability to search either/or but you couldn’t keep your outfits together on the individual shop sites. However, tools like Polyvore allowed you to create outfits but you couldn’t control the filters specific to you. You would need to have several apps taking up precious phone storage just to shop your local mall.

MVP

• Aggregate content from at least five stores in a local mall
• Filter by male/female
• Filter by onboarding sizes
• Ability to organize one outfit

Design/Prototype/Build

Working through several paper prototypes I eventually built it out in Livewires and eventually rebuilding it in Proto.io for user testing. After user testing with my target audience (men and people with disabilities), we found ways to simplify our MVP to the above shown with a full year’s worth of future state work for my development team.

Challenges & Takeaways

From the beginning of this process, it was always down to the data. How to store it, how to get it, how to connect with companies to partner with us. I interviewed several development teams over the years that told me, the technology wasn’t there. Finding the right development partner was the biggest challenge. But the takeaway being, if it’s worth it and you do your diligence with research and planning, it pays off.