Thesis Research

MSc. Thesis Research

Analysis of Online and In-store Clothes Shopping Experiences Taking a User Journey Approach

An actionable guideline on how to design for future clothes shopping experiences, aimed for interaction designers, who design AR, VR and MR interfaces.

Thesis Advisor:

Prof. Dr. Bahar Sener-Pedgley

Objectives:

To understand users' preferences and strategies on clothes shopping along with their needs and expectation,
To examine how the selection of mediums (devices) affects users' clothes shopping process,
To provide insights for designers aiming to design for enhanced clothes shopping experiences.

Duration:

6 Months

Disclaimer:

I wasn't affiliated with any companies mentioned in this thesis while I did this research. All registered trademarks and copyrighted materials are the property of their respective owners.

Background

In parallel to advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT), shopping has evolved as one of the most commonly carried out daily activities in people's lives. This transformation generates different interactions with our physical and digital environment through devices, and different ways of shopping have emerged, leading to reshaping shopping experiences.

As a researcher, my personal motivation is to have better understanding on discovering potential transformation of shopping experiences.

How shopping experience would evolve when interactions are reshaped?

Particularly, 'clothes shopping' is chosen as an experience to focus on this research to understand how clothes shopping occurs when it is not possible to see, touch, and try on the clothes; that is, the senses of sight and touch are restricted.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Existing Technologies

New and more established technologies and concepts such as the Internet of things (IoT), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), chatbots, virtual assistants and metaverse have a great impact on shaping and transforming the shopping experiences. Therefore, these emerging and existing technologies used in shopping were investigated.

Metaverse brings a new dimension to digital experiences. According to the online survey conducted by Squarespace and The Harris Poll in(2021), 60% of Generation Z, and 62% of Millennials found it more important how you present yourself online than how you present yourself in real life. Therefore, it can be said that virtuality and so virtual spaces have great importance and should be considered by designers as they also have potential to enable products, services, and designs to be more creative and innovative.

The well-known fashion brand, Gucci, opened a virtual Gucci Garden in a popular gaming platform, Roblox. Another brand, DressX, creates 3D clothing collections of well-known brands for the digital space. Since AI is not ready to recognize a body to try-on virtually, they decided to make 3D digital versions of clothes and ‘manually' dressing the shoppers.

Focus of the Research

The research focuses on 'user experiences' in clothes shopping particularly. Shopping channels, current trends, and existing technologies used in clothes shopping were examined. As clothes shopping is considered as an experience that heavily rely on products that need to be seen, touched, felt, and tried on, components of the clothes shopping were looked into especially from multi sensory point of view.

In addition, 'how users are seen by themselves and others' was investigated by considering VR, AR, and MR as well as in physical environments.

METHODOLOGY & FIELDWORK SET-UP

Overview

A fieldwork was designed as two phases.

In Phase 1, a three-part questionnaire, prepared in Google Forms, was administered to collect the participants' demographic information, to identify their technology readiness level, and to understand their clothes shopping experience in general along with their preferred shopping mediums and channels.

In Phase 2, semi-structured interviews were conducted to gain insights into preferences of the participants for clothes shopping and to understand their needs and expectations by mapping out this experience as a journey highlighting pain points that they might have encountered.

Structures of two phases of the fieldwork

Participant Sampling

The fieldwork targeted at the participants fulfilling the following criteria: young adults with ages ranging between 18 and 40; having internet access and payment facilities for shopping online as well as previous online shopping experience; and, having no physical/mental limitation to shop in the store.

A digital announcement poster was posted on social media (i.e., Instagram and Facebook) to recruit participants for research.

136 participants completed the online questionnaire and 12 participants were invited to join to the second stage of the study, the interview. In the selection process, whether the participants had both online and in-store clothes shopping experiences were taken into account.

RESULTS & ANALYSIS OF THE FIELDWORK

Analysis of Quantitative Data

The fieldwork analysis will be carried out with combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis methods. In Phase 1 (Questionnaire), quantitative analysis was carried out to evaluate the participants' technology readiness using 5-point Likert Scale as in TRI 2.0.

As TRI 2.0 is already validated on reliability, discriminant validity, and construct validity, any factor analysis for validation was not performed.

The overall readiness score was calculated through the provided formula aiming to calculate the overall readiness score by using mean values of each theme which were optimism, innovativeness, discomfort, and insecurity.

Average scores (out of 5) for per TRI 2.0 themes

‍On this scale, 3 (neutral)represents the scale's mid-point, and the higher mean values of the discomfort and insecurity means that the participants feel insecure and uncomfortable about technological change. Likewise, participants can be considered as optimistic and motivated about technology when the mean values of optimism and innovativeness higher than the scale's midpoint.

According to the results, by considering all 132 participants' responses, the overall readiness score was calculated as 3,32 on a scale. It can be interpreted that participants were optimistic and motivated about technological changes.

'Online clothes shopping' was the most preferred channel by participants, following by in-store shopping, showrooming (browsing offline buying online) and, webrooming (browsing online buying offline).

How participants describe their way of clothes shopping

Analysis of Qualitative Data

For analyzing the qualitative data of the interviews, the general inductive approach was followed as it provides a systematic set of procedures to produce findings. The first step was transcribing interview recordings into Microsoft Word documents.

The raw text data was transferred to Airtable, an online spreadsheet-database hybrid platform for creating relational databases, regarding interview questions, and core meanings in the text relevant to research objectives were identified as phrases. In order to cluster raw data into certain headings, they were content analyzed.

A screenshot of the Airtable data coding table

During data analysis, repeating and potentially related codes were grouped together for each shopping stage which were pre-shopping, during shopping and post-shopping. Some categories and their sub-categories were similar for online and in-store shopping, and some were different and diverse.

Headings (codes) of all phases

The codes identified from phrases considered as vital for this study, and they were examined considering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on participants' clothes shopping experiences, shopping channel preferences for clothes shopping, participants' needs (need for informative labelling, need for touch, need for awareness of body-image, and need of assistance), and others' influence on participants' shopping experiences.

RESEARCHER'S REFLECTIONS

Limitations

Due to the arrival of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, most of the interviews had to be held through online platforms. The adaptation pace to the usage of online platforms has not been the same for everybody. Therefore, it was foreseen that there may still be participants whose online meetings did not become such a natural part of their daily life during the running of the fieldwork interviews.

However, thanks to the provided features of selected tools, online interviews had been conducted free from the constraints of physical location and meeting venue. In fact, since the interviews had to be conducted in a limited time, facilitating online interviews made location and time arrangements easier.

Further Research

The research was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic that accelerated the digitalization in the World and affected even people's daily activities, habits, routines, and inevitably experiences. It created an environment that gave a great opportunity to research to understand and predict future changes. Therefore, further research can take advance of this study, and further explorations in a post-pandemic context can be investigated.