Amanda
Chan

 


WORK

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT

ABOUT

Clothesline

Making sustainable fashion the easy choice on campus

ROLE
UI/UX Designer
TIMELINE
April 2024 - September 2024
TEAM
Project Managers (2)
Developers (3)
UI/UX Designers (3)
TOOLS & SKILLS
Figma
User Research
Prototyping
User Experience
Visual Identity & Branding

THE PROBLEM
Sustainable fashion is easy to support in theory. In practice, it's often too expensive or inconvenient for college students to actually participate in.
Fast fashion is cheap and immediate. The alternatives require time, money, or access that students don’t always have. Clothesline was built to close that gap, giving students a platform to lend and borrow clothes from one another at affordable prices. But before the app could do that, it needed a brand and an experience worth showing up for.



RESEARCH INSIGHTS Before designing anything, the team focused on understanding who we were designing for.

Students were open to borrowing clothes but had concerns about trust, condition, and ease of use — the experience needed to feel seamless before anything else.

A clear brand identity wasn’t just aesthetic, it was a signal to users that the platform was credible and worth trusting with their wardrobe.

     PROCESS
    I led brand identity and UX design, moving from user research to high-fidelity wireframes. 

    • User interviews — conducted research to surface student needs and inform the user flow

    • User personas — synthesized research into personas representing both lenders and borrowers to guide design decisions throughout

    • Figma — led logo design, design system development, and wireframing for the Listing Page from low to high fidelity 
    DESIGN DECISION
    Renaming the app from ClothesMatch to Clothesline to establish a stronger brand foundation.
    When I joined, the concept was being developed under the name ClothesMatch. I saw an opportunity to build something more evocative — a name that reflected the mission rather than just the function. I wanted something that felt fresh and grounded in the natural world, echoing our sustainability values in a playful way.

    Clothesline did that. The word carries a specific image: a wide blue sky, rolling green hills, clothes drying in a warm breeze. That imagery gave the entire team a visual direction to build from, and it gave the brand a personality that ClothesMatch didn't have.





    DESIGN DECISION
    Mapping the full user flow before any designs.
    One of the most valuable steps in the process was the one that produced no visuals. Before any wireframing began, the team worked through every step of the borrowing and lending experience together — from browsing listings to returning an item — identifying where friction could appear and resolving it in conversation rather than in design.

    That investment paid off immediately. Because we had talked through the full flow, the design team could work in parallel across screens rather than waiting on each other. Every screen we needed was accounted for before anyone started building it.




    DESIGN DECISION
    Turning a crowded screen into a clear decision
    The listing page had to carry a lot: photos, price, size, color, condition, pickup location, a description, care instructions, and the lender's profile — all on a single mobile screen. The challenge wasn't what to include, it was what to lead with and how to group what followed. I organized the page so a borrower could make a fast judgment at the top — photo, name, price, tags — and move deeper only if they were interested.



    Item specifics were grouped into an About section to signal that the detail was there without front-loading the experience. The lender's profile and rating sat at the bottom, functioning as a trust signal just before the decision to message. The goal was a page that felt complete without feeling crowded.


    SOLUTION A complete set of high-fidelity wireframes — covering the full borrowing and lending experience — delivered to the development team. This was built upon the 2 user flows that were designed end-to-end, one for lenders and one for borrowers, and the visual identity we created, with the name, logo, and color system chosen with intention and purpose.



    REFLECTION

    A clear concept makes every downstream decision easier.
     Renaming the app wasn't a small change — it reoriented how the whole team thought about the product. 

    Once we had Clothesline as a name with a real visual world behind it, questions about color, logo, and tone became much easier to answer. Investing in the concept in the beginning simplified any decisions that followed. 

    User flow documentation is the best collaboration tool a design team has.
    Working through the borrowing and lending flows as a team before designing anything meant everyone understood the experience the same way. 

    That shared understanding is what made parallel work possible. Without it, we would have been coordinating screens instead of building them.

    What I’d do differently The inital ten-week timeline pushed us toward execution quickly, which was necessary — but it left less room for iteration based on user feedback. With more time, I would have tested the low-fidelity wireframes with actual students before moving to high fidelity, so that structural problems could be caught and corrected before they were designed in full detail.

    © 2026
    AMANDA CHAN