Purple Pages
Design Challenge
Overview
A guidance tool for consumers to shop smart and support fair labor.
Purple Pages is our solution to better educate young adults about fair labor practices of various brands, enabling them to make informed purchasing decisions. Purple Pages helps young adults become more informed consumers for several reasons; young adults may not have the financial capability to always purchase from the most transparent, ethical brands, and they may not have the time to seek out knowledge about the issues themselves. Purple Pages was created in response to a design challenge hosted by Adobe and Patagonia.
Tool:
Adobe XD
Timeline:
2 days
Team:
Hana Chung
Yiting Zheng
Role:
UX design
UI development
Problem space
Our challenge was to design a third-party mobile app that informs a consumer segment about brands who support living wages directly benefiting workers and their families. The solution must create a way to view measurable impact and/or progress. Inherent in this problem is a power differential; those who suffer most from inequitable working conditions also often lack resources they need to call for action.
Project goal
Purple Pages seeks to bring together many sources of information to enhance the user’s knowledge of brands through a unified experience. Different from other applications which seek to inform consumers, Purple Pages also critically allows employees of brands/companies to leave “reviews” of brands they work for, enabling them to hold employers accountable for unfair labor practices.
User persona
Initial sketch
I sketched a rough draft of a user journey flow to think through the logic of our application before starting to wireframe.
Doing this helped me map out the potential interactions a user may go through.
Wireframes
Design solutions
There are 4 main features of Purple Pages, all which differentially contribute to consumers’ information about brands. These four features enable consumers to seek out information about brands and news related to fair labor, determine whether products are created by brands which follow fair labor practices, and learn about brands’ labor practices directly from employees themselves.
Feature I: Fair Labor Education
On the Home page, users can access general information and current news stories related to fair labor practices.
Feature II: Product Scan
Users can scan products as they shop. Once a product is scanned, Purple Pages provides information about the brand, and informs the user about their labor practices and compensation provided to employees. If the brand isn’t found to practice good ethics, Purple Pages offers recommendations for similar products from other brands
Feature III: Brand Info
From the Brands page, users can search for various brands and learn more about them. Purple Pages enables users to filter brands based on their ethical concerns or populations of interest, catering to young adults' individual motivations to support specific groups.
Feature IV: Employee Reviews
Purple Pages allows users to read reviews of the brand from employees. Employees would, ideally, be vetted by the Purple Pages support team to ensure their legitimate work commitment.
Future directions
User interviews and usability testing: In order to enhance the usability of Purple Pages and determine additional user needs, it would be beneficial to incorporate user interviews and usability tests. Only by doing so would it be possible to ensure that Purple Pages has the appropriate features and functionality. One important consideration is that users may want to Scan products as they shop. In order to understand these patterns of behaviors, performing contextual inquiry through direct observation would be highly informative to Purple Pages’ future development.
Employee interface: Purple Pages also needs a separate interface design for employees who seek to leave reviews about their employers or companies they work for. User research would need to be performed in order to determine the best platform for this interface; those who are experiencing unfair labor conditions may not have access to smartphones. We predict that the Purple Pages employee-facing interface would need to be made more accessible and ideally would work for several devices. One way that this consideration could be incorporated would be to design a website component of the service where employees can leave reviews and feedback.