Fitted App:
Casual Style, Shared Simply
Led the design of Fitted, a casual, pressure-free B2C fashion app for sharing outfits with friends. Collaborated with engineers and refined the experience through user interviews and user testing , winning the BU Spark Innovation Award.
Created 26 cloud icons for Stellar Cyber, helping teams visualize alerts and speed up threat correlation.
My Role
UI/UX Design Lead
Timeline
January - April 2025
Tools
Figma
React
OpenAI
Supabase
Raycast
Team
Janet (Designer)
Kate Seo (SWE)
Yuting Lin (SWE)
Isaac Chan (SWE)
Anh Vu (SWE)
At a Glance
Project Overview
Fitted is a fashion social media app where close friends share daily outfits without Instagram’s pressure. Our goal was to build a casual, supportive space that encourages genuine self-expression, peer inspiration, and makes styling fun and intentional.
As sole designer on a team of four engineers and two mentors, I led interviews, MVP iterations, and user testing to create a user-focused, visually cohesive, and technically feasible experience. Our innovative approach earned the BU Spark! Innovation Award.
Fitted is a fashion social app where close friends share outfits without Instagram’s pressure. I designed a casual, supportive space that encourages self-expression and inspiration in daily fashion
As the sole designer with four engineers and two mentors, I led interviews, MVP iterations, and user testing to craft a cohesive experience. Our work earned the BU Spark! Innovation Award.
My Contributions
Designed the full Fitted app in Figma, translating the team’s vision and user insights into a casual, pressure-free fashion experience from onboarding to posting, reactions, and collections.
Led and conducted 10+ user interviews and usability tests with college students to uncover real user needs, validate early concepts, and continuously refine core features through iterative feedback
Facilitated weekly team meetings and ongoing Slack communication, leading user flow brainstorms and ensuring design decisions aligned with both technical constraints and the team’s shared vision.
Designed the full app in Figma, shaping a casual, pressure-free experience from onboarding to posting, reactions, and collections.
Led 10+ interviews and usability tests with college students to uncover needs, validate concepts, and refine core features iteratively.
Facilitated team meetings and Slack communication, guiding user flow brainstorms and ensuring designs aligned with technical constraints and team vision.
Context
What's Wrong with Instagram and Pinterest?
What's Wrong with Instagram and Pinterest?
Many college students find getting dressed stressful. They want to express their personal style or dress appropriately for occasions but often feel uncertain without feedback from friends or a clear sense of what suits them.
Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest promise inspiration, but DAMN, they can be overwhelming. Instagram especially feels performative and focused on likes rather than genuine expression, creating an inauthentic and intimidating space. Plus, much of the content isn’t relevant or relatable to real life, which leads to closets full of unworn clothes and frustration over impulsive purchases.
With Fitted, we aimed to create a simpler, community-driven experience that offers authentic, relevant inspiration from friends—making daily outfit choices feel more intentional, low-pressure, and fun.
Many college students feel stressed choosing outfits, wanting to express personal style or dress for occasions but often lacking feedback from friends.
While platforms like Instagram and Pinterest offer inspiration, Instagram feels performative and irrelevant, fueling unworn clothes and impulsive purchases.
Fitted creates a community-driven space with authentic inspiration from friends, making daily outfit choices intentional, low-pressure, and fun.
Research Process
Initial Problem Hypothesis
Initial Problem Hypothesis
We believe college students struggle with feeling overwhelmed when choosing what to wear, underused wardrobes, and a lack of authentic style guidance. They need a more personal and supportive way to explore their style with help from friends and community.
We believe college students struggle with feeling overwhelmed when choosing what to wear, underused wardrobes, and a lack of authentic style guidance. They need a more personal and supportive way to explore their style with help from friends and community.
Uncovering User Insights Through User Interviews
Uncovering User Insights Through User Interviews
We interviewed 10 college students, asking them to walk us through their experience choosing outfits from start to finish and exploring the different tasks (“jobs”) they perform related to this challenge. This helped us understand their core problems, priorities, and current strategies to refine our hypothesis.
We interviewed 10 college students, walking through their outfit decisions and related tasks to uncover core problems, priorities, and strategies
Interview Takeaway 1: Relevance and Personalization Make Inspiration More Useful
Interview Takeaway 1: Personalized Inspiration Matters
Users frequently turn to platforms like Pinterest and Instagram for outfit ideas but find the content overwhelming, generic, or irrelevant to their style, location, and lifestyle, creating a strong desire for more tailored and meaningful fashion inspiration.
Students want personalized outfit inspiration that feels relevant to their style, location, and lifestyle, instead of the overwhelming, generic content of Pinterest or Instagram.
Interview Takeaway 2: College Students Rely on Trusted Friends for Style Advice
Interview Takeaway 2: Friends Are The Go-To for Outfit Feedbacks
Many users prefer seeking outfit validation and advice from close friends because it offers a supportive, casual, and less performative space to share authentic style feedback. This helps them maintain a sense of individuality and avoid simply following trends.
Students seek feedback from close friends because it offers a supportive, authentic space, helping them maintain individuality rather than just follow trends.
Interview Takeaway 3: Students Struggle with Wardrobe Management and Practicality
Interview Takeaway 3: Students Struggle to Stay Organized
College students are busy, so they struggle with last-minute outfit decisions, underutilized wardrobes, and value practicality along with style. There is a clear need for solutions that help them organize and maximize their existing clothing while supporting sustainable shopping habits.
Students often face last-minute outfit decisions and underutilized wardrobes. They need solutions that organize clothes, maximize usage, and support practical, sustainable style choices.
And So…
And So…
Fitted helps style-conscious college students confidently express themselves by creating a low-pressure space where friends share everyday outfits and inspire each other, making daily style choices fun, casual, and community-driven.
Refining Solutions Through Solution Interviews
Refining Solutions Through Solution Interviews
After identifying core problems, I designed low-fidelity wireframes for five key MVP experiences: onboarding, posting and tagging, searching, commenting, and saving to collections. We then conducted follow-up interviews with 10 college students to gather feedback and ensure the solutions aligned with their real needs and pain points.
I designed low-fidelity wireframes for five key MVP experiences: onboarding, posting/tagging, searching, commenting, and saving to collections. We tested with 10 students to gather feedback and ensure solutions addressed real needs and pain points.
Interview Takeaway 1: Users Want More Customization and Flexibility to Tailor Their Experience
Interview Takeaway 1: Users Need Customization and Flexibility
While users were open to providing height and weight for more personalized outfit suggestions, many preferred measurements like waist, hip, and inseam instead because they are more useful and less sensitive. They also wanted flexibility and control during onboarding, such as uploading photos from their camera roll instead of using in-app camera, to ensure the experience felt comfortable and customized to their needs.
Users want flexible, personalized onboarding, preferring practical measurements like waist, hip, and inseam and the option to upload photos from their camera roll for a comfortable, tailored experience.
Interview Takeaway 2: Users Prefer Low-Pressure and Fun Social Reactions
Interview Takeaway 2: Users Want Casual, Supportive Reactions
While users appreciated the app’s close-knit and casual vibe, they still wanted light forms of engagement such as emoji reactions, likes, and saves to build confidence and encourage interaction without the pressure of commenting. These features were seen as fun, validating, and key to making the platform feel active and encouraging.
Users want light, fun social interactions like emoji reactions, likes, and saves to build confidence and engagement without the pressure of commenting.
Interview Takeaway 3: Users Want a More Community-Driven Search Experience
Interview Takeaway 3: Search Should Be Community-Driven
Instead of searching for specific outfit ideas, users were more inspired by what their friends were wearing and how they styled their pieces. Users like seeing posts from their friends when they use the search feature for a more social, collaborative approach to finding outfit ideas.
Users prefer search results influenced by friends’ posts, making discovery more social, collaborative, and inspiring than traditional keyword searches.
Design Process
After gaining useful insights from user interviews, we understood that our product needed to deliver an engaging yet user-friendly experience where users can confidently connect with friends for relevant style advice and keep their wardrobe organized. We conducted weekly user testing for each feature to continuously refine the experience. Here are three key features and solutions that I designed, which were implemented in the app through code by my teammates.
Based on user insights, we focused on creating an engaging, user-friendly app where users can connect with friends for style advice and keep their wardrobe organized. I designed key features, which were iteratively refined through weekly user testing and implemented by the team.
Post Without Pressure: Playful Emoji Reactions and Comments
Post Without Pressure: Playful Emoji Reactions and Comments
Our first design decision was to eliminate the pressure of like counts common on platforms like Instagram while keeping social interactions fun and light. Users select their favorite emojis from a compact popup, enabling quick, expressive, and low-pressure reactions. This approach encourages active post engagement and lets users give meaningful feedback to friends without the competitiveness of likes, creating a supportive and casual community.
We removed like counts to reduce pressure while keeping interactions fun. Users can react with favorite emojis from a compact popup, giving quick, expressive feedback that encourages engagement and supports a casual, friendly community.
User Testing Takeaway: Users Love Emoji Reactions & Crave More Delight
User Testing Takeaway: Users Love Emoji Reactions
Users loved the emoji reactions, describing them as a fun, low-pressure way to engage with friends’ posts. The emojis offer great variety for the reactions. They appreciated being able to see who reacted with what and suggested adding animations to make the interaction feel more exciting and rewarding. One open question remains regarding how the reaction feature would scale as the number of friends increases.
Users loved the emoji reactions as a fun, low-pressure way to engage with friends. They valued seeing who reacted with what and suggested animations to make interactions more rewarding. One question remains: how the feature scales with more friends.
Get Inspired by Friends' Outfits with Smart AI Search
Get Inspired by Friends' Outfits with Smart AI Search
Designed to help users easily find relevant, personalized outfit ideas from friends, this feature uses OpenAI-powered scanning to automatically tag posts with style, occasion, and item metadata. This makes searching and discovering more relevant for users, ensuring users quickly find inspiration that fits their needs.
This feature helps users find personalized outfit ideas from friends by using OpenAI-powered scanning to tag posts with style, occasion, and item metadata. It makes search and discovery faster, relevant, and tailored to users’ needs.
User Testing Takeaway: Suggested Search Words Improve User Guidance
User Testing Takeaway: Search Suggestions Improve Discovery
Since there weren’t enough posts in the database, users often encountered empty results, which made the search feel unclear or incomplete. They suggested adding features like suggested search terms, clearer messaging when nothing is found, and small UX improvements like an “X” icon to clear the search bar. These would make the search experience feel more intuitive.
Users want suggested search terms and clear feedback when results are empty, making the search experience more intuitive and user-friendly.
Save, Organize, and Revisit Outfits Through Creating Collections
Save, Organize, and Revisit Outfits Through Creating Collections
To solve users’ struggle with tracking worn outfits and managing style inspiration, we introduced collections that let users save their own posts to a “My Outfits” collection and friends’ posts to personalized inspiration collections. I designed the UI of each collection with overlapping images like a flipbook to reflect the app’s casual, personal feel, similar to flipping through a real wardrobe. This feature helps users stay organized, reflect on their style, and plan outfits easily.
To help users track outfits and manage inspiration, we added collections for saving personal posts and friends’ posts. I designed a flipbook-style UI that reflects the app’s casual, personal feel, making it easy to stay organized and plan outfits.
User Testing Takeaway: Loved Collections Design, Wanted More Customization
User Testing Takeaway: Users Love Collections, Crave Flexibility
Users liked the overlapping flipbook style of collections and found creating and saving collections intuitive. They expressed interest in customizing collections further by adding descriptions and sharing them with friends. Additionally, users suggested features to track individual closet items within the “My Outfits” collection for better wardrobe management.
Final Result
At the end of the semester, all of the other teams presented their products on BU Spark’s demo day. And team Fitted is delighted to announce that we received the Judge's Choice Innovation award! Thank you again to our faculty, teaching fellows, and mentors:)
At BU Spark’s demo day, team Fitted won the Judge’s Choice Innovation Award! Thanks to our faculty, teaching fellows, and mentors for their support.
Final Takeaways
Key Takeaway 1: Continuous User Testing is Crucial for Successful Features
Key Takeaway 1: Iterative Testing with Users Is Key
Continuous user testing is essential for designing features that truly resonate with users. In Fitted, usability tests directly shaped three of the five most-used MVP features: emoji reactions, a more intuitive search, and personalized collection. These revealed what users found intuitive, enjoyable, and worth returning for. This experience taught me the value of validating ideas early and refining designs based on real behavior rather than assumptions, a practice I’ll continue to prioritize in future projects.
Continuous user testing is key to creating features that resonate. In Fitted, user tests shaped three of the most-used MVP features: emoji reactions, intuitive search, and personalized collections. This reinforced the importance of validating ideas early and refining designs based on real behavior.
Key Takeaway 2: Craft Designs With Purpose and Always Think of the "Why"
Making intentional, user-centered design decisions ensures features are both meaningful and enjoyable. For example, I designed the flipbook-style UI for collections in Fitted to help users easily organize their outfit inspirations while providing a casual, personal feel. This reinforced the importance of aligning every design choice with user needs and context, and I’ll carry forward the mindset of always asking “why” to create purposeful interactions that go beyond aesthetics.
Intentional, user-centered design makes features meaningful and enjoyable. I designed Fitted’s flipbook-style collections to help users organize outfit inspirations while keeping a casual, personal feel. This reinforced the value of aligning design with user needs and always asking “why” to create purposeful interactions beyond aesthetics.
Key Takeaway 3: Cross-Functional Collaboration Drives Stronger and More Complete Design
Key Takeaway 3: Cross-Functional Collaboration Drives Stronger Design
Cross-functional collaboration is key to successful product execution. As the sole designer on a team of engineers, I learned the importance of clearly communicating and aligning design goals with technical constraints. By leading meetings, presenting options, and actively seeking diverse perspectives, I gained insights that strengthened both the look and feasibility of our solutions. I’ll carry this collaborative approach into future projects to actively work seamlessly across disciplines and deliver well-rounded, impactful designs.
Cross-functional collaboration is essential for successful products. As the sole designer on a team of engineers, I learned to communicate clearly, align design goals with technical constraints, and incorporate diverse perspectives. This approach strengthened both the look and feasibility of our solutions and is a practice I will carry into future projects to deliver well-rounded, impactful designs.
Contact Me!
Contact Me!
janetjliu
janetliu.ca@gmail.com
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Key Projects
Key Projects