Background

Chicks is a local fashion brand that mainly sells innerwear. It is famous among the local people which provide ensures quality, health and safety product and service for over 60 years.

To catch up with the digital age, they started exploring online platforms, including e-shops, advertising on different social media, official websites, apps etc. In this project, Chicks is going to publish their new created App and want to seek some advice on how to increase the download rate and sustain user using their App.

Before providing the solutions, we should understand more about Chicks and why they got difficulties on their online platforms. We are going to do the desktop research and customer interview to analyse the root problems and get some insights. Then, we will define a design direction and build the prototypes for user testing to validate the solution.

Desktop Research

Chicks current customers’ age group

The age of Chicks users is concentrated in 40 – 55 years old, whereas the proportion of younger customers is lower.

Expected future target group & purchasing behavior

CHICKS wants to expand its marketing to the new younger customers between 25 to 44 years old via the online market. Besides, the research mentions that traditional customers prefer offline shopping while younger customers prefer online shopping.

Therefore, we can see the opportunity that new younger customers (25 – 44) will be the expected future target users to purchase online.

Explore the way to attract new younger customers with AIDA model

AIDA is one of the first user growth frameworks and can be thought of as the entire behavioural process of a user making a decision, from attention-getting to the final purchase.

Via the AIDA model, we know that:

• The first impression decides how customers would perceive the brand when they came across it through digital platforms.
• It progressively affects subsequent stages, which means if the brand fails to attract users’ awareness at the beginning, it would be hard for users to do the following actions.

Existing problems in Awareness

• Brand image is not well expressed to potential customers.

• Although Chicks has rebranded, the brand image perceived by customers is still in the old mindset, which makes it hard to attract customers.

• Lack of an attractive and clear way to show the brand image, which causes fewer likes and followers.
• The lack of interactions with customers has an impact on the brand image.

To conclude, the digital platforms of app and social media promotions do not deliver the latest brand image well to attract customers’ awareness.

Summary

Based on the research, we sum up a question that needs to explore in the next customer interview section.

Customer Interview

Setup

7 target users aged 25 – 44 years old

Shopping behavior

• How are the customer journeys of the younger customers?

Brand image

• How do the younger customers perceive brand image?
• What do they think of Chicks’ brand image?

Promotion

• What information is important on the home page of an app to help user understand its brand values?
• What features should be involved in promotion touchpoints to better enhance the expression of brand image?

Tasks

• Interview and asking “Why” and follow up questions
• Compare the home page with other competitors
• Compare the advertisements from social media with other competitors

Analysis — Shopping Behavior

We found that there are many considerations to trigger the users to download an app. The most influential touchpoint is the advertising that users learn and receive the brand image from it. Ads are an important way to attract users’ attention to the brand.

Analysis — Brand image & Promotion

By looking at the data, we can obviously find that Chicks app homepage and its advertising are not able to attract most of the participants and are difficult to evoke emotional resonance.

Task 1. Home page comparison

We provided 3 app prototypes for participants to browse and asked them to rate each of the 3 apps.

Task 2. Advertising comparison

We provided 3 brand Ads for participants to browse and asked them to select the ads that attracted them the most

When asking the participant to describe the Chicks via the Ads and app, they express it differently from the expected brand image. They consider Chicks as a Hong Kong local brand selling high-quality thermal clothes, but outdated, ugly, and nothing special. However, Chicks wants to give customer the image of young, sustainable, warm, safe, and family.

We further learn how the young customers learn about the brand image to explore the space for the design. They mentioned that visual design plays an important role for them to learn the brand, such as the image, text, color, layout of the Ads and the product categories, app color tones, models, etc.

• Inconsistent design of promotional materials on different platforms, making it more difficult for users to recognize the brand
• Inconsistent information conveyed by images and text, resulting in users not understanding relevant product information

Design Direction

Potential Areas

Enhance the consistency of Chicks’ design to make customers clear about its brand image

• Establish a consistent design style on APP and Ads to well present the brand image
• Set up guideline for photograph, image presentation and tone of voice that will deliver the brand identity across all touch-point

We hope this can increase the awareness of Chicks and strengthen its latest brand image perceived from the target users.

Competitor Analysis

We try to research and learn from the competitor on how they promote their brand image in three areas and take their advantage to later develop our design guidelines. 01) Content design, 02) Style Design, 03) Storytelling.

Uniqlo Ads

As Uniqlo being the most powerful competitor, we did an in-depth study on its IG posts to find potential opportunities to improve.

• Educational content (e.g Re-uniqlo & Product treatment lessons) to introduce product series while highlighting brand value
• Simplified verbal text to enable quick and easy browsing
• Strong color contrast of text on image to highlight product feature

• Consistent style in terms of color & layout & icon to introduce specific product series

• Relate its product with sustainable lifestyle to evoke emotional resonance
• Skillful product image to indicate size selection and show the feeling of family

Ads from Other Brands

We also took references from other excellent ads with high like rates to know how to provide a consistent brand image to attract customers on awareness stage.

• Entertaining content with casual tone catering to the local trend to attract customers
• Inspiring content to introduce product feature and probable wearing occasions
• Promotion content displaying product feature to inform product advantages

• Same layout, icon and color tone within a certain post theme to show brand consistency

• Real-life scenarios to provide user with references and also evoke emotional resonance
• Facial expression of the model and background to render certain atmosphere and convey brand image
• Models of different shapes and sizes to attract larger customer segments.

Design Guideline

Based on the research, we create the design guidelines for Chicks to enhance their visual expression on their branding. It relates to two main areas, consistent style and storytelling. Chicks can apply the guidelines no matter on social media, but also on digital platforms including the app and website.

By establishing a consistent design style on both digital platforms (APP and Ads) to enhance awareness of Chicks and strengthen its brand image in customers’ minds. Besides, storytelling can show the occasions how users can wear the products and relate it to real-life scenarios to evoke emotional resonance.

Evaluation

Based on the design guidelines, we created a set of advertising posts and mocked them up on Instagram. Instagram can show an overview of all the posts on one page that allow the participant to feel the consistency of the new design in the user test. Also, the app home page is redesigned to demonstrate the cross-channel experience of consistency. We use these two prototypes to validate our concept via the user test.

User test setup

3 local young women

• Is the brand image consistent between different platforms?
• Do customers perceive the brand image correctly and clearly?
• Can the Ads visuals and content attract users?
• Does the new design encourage customers to take the next action?

• Group the images from different branding promotions
• Interview on the redesigned prototypes.

Result

Participants can group our redesigned posts into one category among different branding promotions

Participants think the design and brand image are consisted in the two prototypes (IG and APP homepage)

Participants can use these words to describe the branding via the new design:

Participants feel the design target the age between 27-4X women and younger generation, which matches Chicks expected target group we mentioned before.

Participants can be attracted by a least one post related to their interests and needs. It proves that different kinds of posts can achieve success in attracting different people's attention.

Conclusion

In this study, we mainly focus on Instagram for testing and enhancement. The advanced promotion methods of other platforms needs to be further explored. While the visual is very objective among people that different people may have different perceptions of the same image, we can ensure that:

Showcase

Reflections

Further Exploration of Promotion

There are many features on different platforms, like we use the story and story highlight on Instagram in this project so that the user can quickly access the brand information from it. Apart from Instagram, other advanced promotion methods on different platforms needed to be explored to enhance the experience and increase the potential customers’ awareness.

Speak Out the Weakness Bravely

The initial goal of this project is to provide some ideas to enhance the experience of Chicks’ newly created app. However, when we went through the research, we found a blocker on branding awareness that may affect the performance on all the digital platforms. We struggled should we keep developing the ideas for the app or point out this problem with solutions to the clients. We decided to speak out about the weakness bravely because we are responsible for putting ourselves into users’ shoes as UX designers. Although we are not fulfilling the primary goal, this decision should benefit both users and companies.