Style Studio
End-to-end Experience Design Project driven by Psychology theories and persuasive design techniques.
Carnegie Mellon University, 2024
Overview
Duration
8 weeks
Team
Avanita Sharma, Nikita Kulkarni, Sapna Parihar, Will Scott
Software Used
Figma, Adobe Suite
Conducted primary and secondary research into the problem area.
Narrowed intervention scope and developed the Game.
Formulated UX Maps and UI Mood Boards.
Assisted with lo-fi wireframes and conducted Usability Testing.
Created and Prototyped hi-fi screens.
Contribution
Role
Psychology Research, UI/UX Design
Problem Area
The goal was to minimize the discrepancy between individuals’ held values around sustainability and ecological preservation against overconsumption behaviors in the fast-fashion industry. In psychology and human-computer interaction literature, researchers broadly refer to this discrepancy as the “action-value” gap. By educating and empowering our target audience to recognize the ecological impact of their consumption choices, we hoped to ultimately fostering long-term behavioral changes toward sustainable alternatives such as clothing swaps and up-cycling. Specifically, we targeted Gen Z and Millennials, as research indicates these two groups are major fast fashion consumers and hold pro-social environmental attitudes and beliefs. The need for these interventions is understood by the ongoing ecological crisis and environmental pollution, due to the overconsumption of cheap, low-quality garments, primarily affecting the global south and low-income countries. The influence of the digital social landscape plays a significant role in promoting materialistic values, particularly through social media. As individuals navigate factors such as convenience, lack of knowledge on the topic, social pressures, and trends; the intervention can challenge and reshape unsustainable consumption behaviors, promoting more mindful and eco-friendly lifestyles.
Style Studio is a multiplayer online fashion game aimed at inspiring sustainable fashion choices while promoting creativity, community interaction, and mindfulness about consumption habits. The platform integrates gamified styling challenges, friendly competition, and meaningful social engagement to make sustainability fun and interactive. Players can style avatars using a mix of preloaded virtual wardrobes and items from their real-life (IRL) closets. By encouraging users to value their existing clothing and engage in collaborative activities like borrowing and lending, Style Studio fosters a culture of sustainable fashion while celebrating individuality and creativity.
Outcome
New users begin with an account creation process, followed by an introduction to the platform’s key features. To enhance personalization, players are prompted to select core values such as Growth, Gratitude, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, and Mindfulness. These values appear in their profiles and are revisited throughout gameplay to reinforce their importance.
Onboarding :
After setting up their profile, players create and customize a digital avatar that represents their unique style. A brief tutorial introduces them to gameplay mechanics, ensuring a smooth and intuitive start. This personalized onboarding experience sets the tone for a meaningful and engaging journey in Style Studio.
Avatar and Tutorial :
Style Studio integrates players’ real-life clothing into the game, allowing users to upload photos of their wardrobe items, categorize them, and add personal stories about their significance. This fosters a deeper connection with their clothing, encouraging creative styling of existing items both in the game and real life. By showcasing fresh combinations of IRL wardrobe pieces, the game promotes sustainability by inspiring users to repurpose what they already own instead of buying new clothes.
Personal Closet :
The core gameplay of Style Studio revolves around theme-based challenges. Each round begins with a theme, such as “Brat” or “Retro” which players use to guide their styling decisions. Players select clothing and accessories for their avatars either from their IRL wardrobe or the preloaded in-game wardrobe. Players can choose to play with friends or strangers, adding flexibility and variety to the experience. When playing with friends, the game includes a unique borrowing feature, allowing users to view and borrow items from each other’s IRL wardrobes. This encourages the practice of borrowing and lending clothes in real life, helping to reduce stigma around the concept while promoting sustainable consumption habits. Borrowed items retain the original descriptions written by their owners, adding emotional significance and a sense of shared value to the gameplay.
Gameplay :
Styled avatars walk the virtual runway, where participants view each outfit in a dynamic presentation and vote on the best look based on creativity, theme alignment, and sustainability. Games follow a best-of-three format, blending competition with creativity. A robust rewards system tracks progression with personalized badges like “Reuse Rockstar” for reusing items or “Sustainability Champion” for eco-friendly styling. Congratulatory messages reinforce user values, and badges unlock in-game wardrobe options, encouraging sustainable behavior. A leaderboard adds friendly competition, driving ongoing engagement.
Voting, Badges, and Leaderboard :
Self-Relevance
The personalized onboarding process enhances engagement by making the game intuitive and emotionally resonant, building a stronger connection between players and their values.
Priming
Subtly reinforces players’ core values throughout gameplay, influencing their decision-making and behavior in a positive, sustainable direction.
Self-Affirmation Theory
Encourages players to align their actions with their core values, strengthening intrinsic motivation and fostering a sense of personal integrity.
Social Comparison Theory
Reduces competitive consumption by encouraging players to share meaningful stories and celebrate creativity. This shifts focus from external validation to intrinsic value, fostering empathy and appreciation for sustainable styling.
Self-Determination Theory
Promotes intrinsic motivation by making rewards and accomplishments personally relevant. The game fosters a deeper connection to one’s values and emphasizes the intrinsic joy of creativity, sustainability, and mindful consumption.
Operant Conditioning
Rewards players with personalized badges and in-game wardrobe options for achievements, such as reusing items or choosing eco-friendly options. These rewards reinforce positive actions and address the scarcity mindset by highlighting the value of maximizing existing resources rather than seeking new ones. By aligning badges with players’ selected values, accomplishments feel personally meaningful, countering intrinsic insecurities and emphasizing self-worth over material consumption.
Endowment Effect
Highlights the value of personal ownership by encouraging players to see their existing wardrobe as meaningful and valuable. This reframing strengthens appreciation for current resources and reduces the impulse to acquire new items.
Gamification
Enhances engagement through structured challenges, progression systems, and rewards. This approach shifts focus from material acquisition to creative self-expression and skill development, transforming the experience into one of growth and fulfillment.
Psychological Theories Utilized
Our design process followed the UX design framework, starting with research and moving to problem space definition. This informed our brainstorming and design iterations, which led to the development of our prototype. The prototype was tested, and the insights gathered prompted further design adjustments, bringing us back to brainstorming new strategies.
Process
Research Summary
In the early stages of the project, our team conducted a literature review to explore the structural, social, and psychological barriers that inhibit pro-social behavior around ecological awareness. Research by Bick, Halsey, and Ekenga (2018) validated the need for intervention by highlighting fast fashion’s environmental and social harms, such as untreated wastewater discharge and exploitative labor practices in low-income countries, which externalize costs onto vulnerable populations. Grandin, Lemoine, and Nemery (2022) addressed the “value-action” gap, identifying factors like information deficiencies, structural barriers (e.g., cost, infrastructure), and psychological factors such as social cognition that inhibit pro-environmental behavior. Wojdyla and Chi (2021) focused on Generation Z, whose preferences for fast fashion conflict with growing environmental awareness, underscoring the need for targeted education to shift consumption patterns. Finally, Gifford (2011) outlined psychological barriers such as social comparison and limited cognition, providing frameworks like the theory of planned behavior to inform behavior change. These insights equipped our team to design an engaging intervention promoting sustainable fashion consumption.
We started with a simple low-fidelity wireframe to map out the game's flow on-screen, allowing us to quickly test and refine it. This approach helped us identify and eliminate unnecessary elements that didn’t align with the core design, enabling us to iterate and improve more efficiently.
Wireframing & UX Mapping
Low Fidelity Wireframes
After researching and coming up with a broad flow overview, we proceeded with wireframing. This step helped us visualize the app's flow more clearly, identify screen-to-screen navigation issues, and prepare for preliminary testing.
Initial testing on our low-fi prototypes revealed a few foundational user experience issues, particularly around unclear buttons and navigation. Users needed better context for the value selection process and game rules, leading us to develop a structured tutorial within the gameplay in the next iterations.
Based on user testing, we noticed that most feedback focused on visuals rather than the gameplay flow. To address this, we decided to finalize the visuals early, creating a high fidelity prototype, allowing users to concentrate on the game itself. This approach enabled us to gather more precise and actionable feedback on which aspects of the gameplay were fun, confusing, or boring..
User Testing
UI Explorations and High Fidelity Prototype
In developing our design language, we opted for a Y2K aesthetic to evoke nostalgia in players, reminiscent of childhood dress-up games on older computers. To reinforce the theme of sustainability, we incorporated imagery like leaves, subtly priming players with sustainable values throughout the game. This approach was inspired by our metaphor exercise, where we learned that people often associate greenery and leaves with the environment and sustainable actions.
So while creating a high-fidelity prototype and flow, we explored our UI style language, focusing on the feelings we wanted to evoke in users. We iterated on different asset and UI styles to establish a unified design language that integrated our priming elements and fostered engagement through nostalgia. This helped us deliver a cohesive experience while collecting precise feedback on the key game loop.
Tutorial Flow :
Personal Wardrobe Flow :
Main Gameplay Loop :
Features and Implementation Plan
We envision a fully playable game that incorporates features from our prototype and additional user-informed elements, such as:
• Connecting players’ personal values to game themes and badges.
• Adding design challenges focused on sustainability.
Once completed, we will launch the game for our target audience - Millennials and Gen Z.
Study Design
To assess the game’s impact on fashion habits, we will:
1. Recruit Participants:
Screen Millennials and Gen Z with surveys and Likert scales to divide them into:
• Control Group: Sustainable fashion habits.
• Experimental Group: Frequent, unsustainable shopping.
2. Track Habits:
The experimental group will play the game regularly for a year while tracking shopping habits, and the control group will track habits without gameplay.
3. Evaluate Impact: Conduct post-study surveys, interviews, and behavioral storytelling to identify habit changes.
4. Compare Data: Analyze shifts in shopping behaviors and attitudes, determining if the game fosters long-term sustainable habits.
Substantial positive changes will validate Style Studio’s ability to promote sustainability.