ClosetTracker
The problem
In 2014, my wife served as inspiration. She told me about her small closet and how she basically forgot about some of her items. Items lost in the back of the closet. She wished she could have something just tell her what to wear, or at least track it. I started to casually ask friends and strangers and discovered a problem space.
New York City has many fashionable women with lots of clothing, but small closets.
Rummaging through your closet to find something to wear is a hassle.
People waste time and money looking for the right clothes in their closet and not wearing things they’ve bought.
The breakdown
Using my casual conversations, I defined a user for ClosetTracker.
Upper-middle class
25+ employed women
Spends for wardrobe updates, but doesn’t have a huge apartment
Likes to be organized and has separate clothing for work, evenings, and weekends.
All interviews mentioned the movie ‘Clueless’ and the main character’s automated outfit software. This demonstrated the mental model to me very clearly and I moved my designs in that direction.
The closet software from clueless served as a great mental model for potential users. It came up in every interview.
Pinterest’s grid model seemed like a great place to start for browsing and organizing your clothing.
The Isotope jQuery plugin allowed me to get a working prototype in JS put together quickly.
the Solution
I built simple mockups with stock imagery in HTML using the jQuery Isotope plugin inspired by Pinterest’s familiar grid UI. From there, I showed it to anyone who would listen and fit the user type. I discovered two main themes:
Simply displaying clothing wasn’t going to be enough. The user needed tagging, categorization, and updating views. This was key to make it different from other budding apps.
To add real value, the app needed to create outfits for users based on the tagging, categorization, brands, and colors.
the result
I opened ClosetTracker to the public after building the site in .NET MVC. My wife and several friends used it. I even garnered anonymous users as well (<50 total). It was fun, but several issues stopped my work on the project.
Technology changes limited the page scraping functionality and the usage of ClosetTracker as a whole.
The adding of clothes into personal databases remained a big roadblock for adoption. It is onerous, difficult to automate, and very hard to do for users.
ClosetTracker ultimately needed to be turned into a mobile app to expand usage, adoption, and to add a marketplace (like Poshmark). I didn’t (and still don’t) have the skillset to build out the scalable mobile environment required.