Ironhack Week 5| Editorial: designing a women’s online magazine to combat stereotypes
“What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.”
— Miuccia Prada
In Week Five of Ironhack’s UX/UI bootcamp we were tasked with giving users a fresh, technological experience on a traditional platform in a 5-day sprint. Editorial publications are a world I feel comfortable in, but also one of which I’m highly aware is suffering due to technological advances. Thus, my challenge for the week was to avoid falling into the trap of designing something static and instead to make the most of the new programs we’d be learning at bootcamp, including Principle for animating user interfaces. We also focused on the UX agile strategy jobs-to-be-done, where we create specific scenarios based on a user persona and assess the functional, emotional and social gains of each action
UX Research: assessing the competition
Women’s fashion publications are under threat from free online articles, social media updates, fashion bloggers and other 21st-century forms of content creation. However, publications such as Vogue carry on with a strong brand image. We were divided into groups of three for the Editorial project, and while my teammates began designing and distributing a user survey, I got to work on creating documents around the business context. I found that several fashion publications (we focused on Mexican editions for this project) have a similar aesthetic and feel.
Information Architecture: including what the user needs
Our principal insights drawn from interviews, an online survey, benchmarking and online research included:
- Users primarily read women’s publications in their spare hours during their lunch break or before going to sleep on a mobile devices
-Vogue and Cosmopolitan are the most read devices
-Users are mainly women, millenials and Gen Z’s
-Their principal interests are fashion and beauty trends (57%), followed by health and fitness, technology news (39.3%) and personal growth (25%).
-They want to see publications use a more inclusive tone of voice with real-looking models and a move away from excessive use of stereotypes.
Following our investigations, we gave our user persona a name and story:
We took this information and got to work on what our publication would look like.
UI Elements:
We designed a multiplatform experience for Giovanna, imagining that she (like the majority of the users we spoke to during our research process) discovers Front Row while browsing the internet on her desktop at work, then returns to the site on mobile during her lunch break to check the latest news and fashion trends, before spending more time scrolling through content on a tablet before going to bed.
Check out a mobile prototype of the publication below, which includes a feature to try on makeup in-publication.
Below is a tablet prototype my teammate worked on, where Giovanna can access saved articles, make a profile and sign up for exclusive reader events.
At the end of the week, we agreed on the following project conclusion:
An online fashion publication which is more inclusive will satisfy users who are looking for content which is useful, up-to-date and of a high quality. Including more content on technology in the publication will attract users who aren’t fans of traditional media for its excessive use of feminine stereotypes. The inclusion of features such as trying on makeup digitally boosts an interactive and attractive platform for our audience and encourages interaction with the publication across multiple platforms.
What I enjoyed about the editorial project was the ability to work on a project which could really be taken to market. Many users have told us they are looking for a more tech-savvy publication to incorporate into their daily readership. I learned it’s more about making information clear and attractive, rather than competing with well-known brands, and addressing users in a tone of voice which is not patronising. It was also interesting to see how we needed to adapt our publication to each platform and take the users’ needs into consideration in doing so. Fashion doesn’t need to be a trivial pursuit, it’s a way of expressing one’s self and interacting with popular culture, and one with a loyal following. In the future, it would be great to play with digital fashion, AI experiences and 3D printed products in a fashion editorial. A future which I’m sure is not too far away.
