CUSTOMZY
The product:
We are creating this website to help customers customize and print their own designed shirts quickly and at affordable prices. The typical user is between 19-35 years old and wants to create their designs and let the creativity flow.
Project Role:
UX designer and UX researcher
Project duration:
Start: October 2022
End: November 2022
The Problem
Digital T-shirt printing has its own market need, but firms confront numerous challenges in meeting that demand, including design, size, quality, typography, and fonts. Creating an original and creative look can take too much time for the average user.
Research
The global custom t-shirt printing market size was valued at USD 3.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.9% from 2022 to 2030. Custom-designed t-shirts are increasingly being used by companies as a modern branding strategy to brand their company, products, or offerings. This technique is used by companies, especially start-ups, to increase their brand visibility and grab the attention of their prospective customers. Therefore, the growing use of customized t-shirts as a branding tool is expected to be a major contributor to market growth over the forecast period.
The fashion industry is witnessing a shift toward wearing customized clothing. Also, the increasing disposable income of consumers is enabling them to spend on customized clothes. As a result, people prefer wearing customized t-shirts with specific logos or slogans printed on them. The entertainment industry is contributing to the market growth with a large number of people, especially movie fanatics, buying apparel with slogans or logos printed on them.
For instance, television series such as Game of Thrones and Big Bang Theory have a huge fan base. The fans willingly spend a good amount on buying t-shirts or other apparel with their favorite dialogues or slogan printed on t-shirts. This trend is expected to majorly contribute to the custom t-shirt printing industry's growth in the forthcoming years. There is an increase in the use of custom printed t-shirts to create social awareness, raise a voice, and support a cause. However, specific designs and slogans printed on the t-shirts related to sensitive issues, such as diseases, gender, crime, and politics, are subject to criticism and legal actions. Further, customers from various industries, including hospitality, logistics, construction, industrial, and medical are increasingly providing custom printed t-shirts to their employees and customers which is used as a marketing technique.
The Goal
Customzy idea is to offer user-friendly and interactive design tools, that will help the user create custom clothing with less effort. It also has templates for you to work on and integrates with AI-crafted images so you can print your ideas without the burden of royalty infringement. From series fanatics, personalized logos for team sports or to create social awareness, the website intends to provide the required tools to create any design that the user wants.
Persona
22,Los Angeles, CA
College student
“Creating your designs is a great option if you’re looking for modern, nontraditional clothing"
Josh is currently studying architecture and is working as an intern in a medium-sized architecture studio. He is highly creative and is always looking to create new designs and print them into shirts. He loves standing out with his custom-made clothing and his shirt designs usually attract a lot of attention, especially from his friends. He is currently researching a reliable website to print his creations and maybe expand into his own business.
Goals
Quickly print his designed shirts
Work with companies that value sustainability in their products
Expand his shirt printing into a potential business
Frustrations
Bad customer support from companies
Cluttered websites with bad navigation
Clothing brands that overcharge for mediocre designs and products
Ideation
You can view the Customzy low-fidelity prototype here
Usability Study
Usability studies findings
- Creation
The main feature of the website, the creation of the designs needs to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible.
- User flow
The whole process of creating your design, ordering and paying needs to be straightforward and without deviation
- Creativity
Helping the users explore new ideas or give them templates to work with can help reduce the time spent creating the design by a significant amount
Mockups and changes
The steps for creating the design are simpler to identify and help guide the user in completing the process and creating the final product. I also added filters to help the user select templates that will help them get started.
The steps for creating the design are simpler to identify and help guide the user in completing the process and creating the final product. I also added reviews to the product at the bottom of the page so that the user can decide which product fits better for their purpose
Screen variations
High Fidelity Prototype
Takeaways
Impact:
“I love custom-made shirts and accessories. Much of what is sold in today's industry has boring and lacking designs and is all similar. Having a website that helps you create your designs be as simple as possible would be great and I would certainly start using them more. Most of these sites take too long to create something and it's just better to have your art ready and just have it printed."
-From one of the high-fidelity prototype testers
What I learned:
When creating a website for e-commerce, a highly competitive area, especially for clothing and the custom-made printing segment, a good competitive audit is really necessary. Learning to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors can be a key factor to make the end-user experience as clear and intuitive as possible.