Project overview
Sliced Bread Design was approached by Gap to understand how women shop for sports bra - specifically their experiences, pain points, and unmet needs - in order to inform an innovative shopping experience.
The focus was on women with larger cup sizes, as prior research suggested they faced the greatest difficulty finding supportive options
Skills
User research, synthesis, workshop ideation
Duration
October 2018 - November 2018
The Research
First-hand shopping
Before the sessions, I went to a competitor store on my own to experience their approach firsthand and to better understand the context of in-store shopping before going into the field with participants.
Interviews and online browsing
I helped draft and finalize screener questions and an interview discussion guide. Sessions began with background questions about their exercise habits and lifestyle, then transitioned into shopping habits and a live browsing session, observing how participants navigated that experience in real time.
Interview session breakdown
How women navigated categories and filters
Shop-alongs
We then accompanied participants to Gap-owned stores and the competitors they frequented, observing how they searched for, evaluated, and physically tested sports bras in person. This gave us a firsthand look at the gaps between the shopping experience and how women actually shopped.
Checking the fabric
Checking the straps
Taking what we learned
Testing rapid experiments
After presenting our findings to the client in a workshop that included individual and group ideation, teams formed around different opportunity areas to build and test rapid experiments with participants. I supported one group in drafting the concept, facilitating, and taking notes.
Drafting rapid experiment ideas
The impact
Supporting the shopping experience
The research gave Gap a set of focused findings to guide their next steps, reinforcing some prior assumptions while surfacing several new directions that hadn’t been explored before. These findings gave Gap a foundation towards a shopping experience that reflects how women actually make decisions.
Solidifying future directions to explore