Week 4: Competitive research

UXD730

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Based on the last meeting, the team and I decided to split the topics and research one competitor noting down the positives and negatives. I looked into a few sources using Google Scholar and online articles. We all agreed that augmented reality (AR) was a potential idea we could look into and move away from a standard mobile app. I found there were many retailers that used AR technology. For example, ASOS launched an AR feature called “See my fit” which allows users to visualise an item of clothing on a range of 16 models with different heights and weights walking on a virtual catwalk. Users can choose the model that best fits their body shape so they can imagine what the clothing looks like. This has increased their revenue to 24% in February 2021 (Gilliland 2021).

I have found a competitor called Augment - 3D Augmented Reality which allows businesses and brands to visualise 3D models of products in AR, capturing the real size and dimensions of the product and selling them on their website. This helps customers see the product as they would in real life and helps to increase sales and revenue. This sparked ideas for the sustainability project. There are lots of upcycling and reselling companies such as vinted and eBay that allows users to resell products they own. One of the concerns from the user interview stated that the user found it time-consuming for them to upload a picture and write down the description and price before selling. AR technology can create an innovative way to make it easier for users to capture their clothing items online.

Based on the competitive research, we formulated our initial problem statement:

It is difficult and inconvenient to sell items of clothing online, as it is time consuming to list multiple items, including descriptions, condition, tagging and knowing how much to sell the items for.

Reflecting on this week, reviewing other brands and companies that have implemented interesting AR technology in their products has been insightful. However, I still feel a little uncertain about what idea we will end up choosing. The next step is to start independent ideation sessions and to record ourselves briefly talking through our sketches to share with the team, and this will narrow down our options and finalise the project idea.

We have discovered our meetings tend to run over one hour and that we spend too much time showcasing our findings. So instead, we will add our research to the Figjam board and record a short showcase 24 hours before the meeting so we can review them and provide feedback. We want to keep our discussions for group work only where we can make decisions together whilst independent work is completed in our own time.

The team members and I all have full-time jobs with similar hours, so when we do have a meeting after work, we are exhausted and demotivated. To solve this issue, we moved the meetings to Monday evenings and pushed them half an hour earlier. This is to avoid having late meetings and we can have some time to rest. We will start implementing this new schedule in week six, hopefully improving our collaboration.

References

GILLILAND, Nikki. 2021. ‘14 Examples of Augmented Reality Brand Experiences’. Econsultancy [online]. Available at: https://econsultancy.com/14-examples-augmented-reality-brand-marketing-experiences/ [accessed 21 Jun 2022].