Background Discovery and research into River Island’s new clothes recycling scheme which launched as a trial. The goal was to increase user awareness and improve the usability.

Timeline 2 weeks

Team Myself Associate UX Designer Content Team

Stakeholders Sustainability team

The Challenge How can we raise user awareness of the Take Back Scheme, and encourage them to participate?

Usability In order to participate in the scheme, users need to know the steps they need to take in order to do so, and to be able to do it with ease.

Metrics to evaluate success Number of customers participating in the scheme, number of £5 discount vouchers redeemed.

Goals Identify the key pieces of information users need to know in order to participate in the scheme, and pain points that may prevent them from doing so.

The minimum amount of items needed to receive the incentive was unclear.

Unclear that clothes from all brands are accepted.

No imagery of the recycling bins - how will users know what they look like in store?

Unclear that users can have their items collected by courier.

Large blocks of difficult to scan through text

To find out if the email is informative enough to customers.

Is the Take Back Scheme webpage is discoverable to customers?

To identify any barriers to the adoption of the scheme.

Unclear that users can have their items collected by courier.

Large blocks of difficult to scan through text

16 women between the ages of 25 - 35.

Read the email and feedback

Find the Take Back Scheme page on riverisland.com

Read through the Take Back Scheme page and feedback

Customers are less likely to participate in the scheme if

They don’t see the value.

They don’t feel fully informed and therefore confident.

They’re unable to easily discover the information they’re looking for.

To find what the clothes recycling scheme landscape looked like.

Understand what features we needed in order to compare with our competitors.

M&S and Levi’s had the most user friendly and informative schemes amongst competing retailers. All relevant information was provided upfront, with the steps for how to participate broken down into an easy to read and process format.

Make the name of the scheme clearer

Explain if the scheme has a deadline or not

Display the Terms & Conditions

Make it easier to scan through list of participating stores

Clothing from any brand is accepted - make this clear

Imagery of the Donation Bins

What happens to donated clothes?

What happens once items have been donated in store? - And what does the customer need to do next?

Make the Take Back Scheme page easier to find - add links to the footer and sustainability page

By doing this, we can compete with other fashion retailers offering a similar scheme.

Description of scheme 

Detailed steps 

Calls to action 

One of the challenges of this project was managing the expectations of the Content team which included Copy Writing, Graphic design, and Branding.

We had to make sure the user’s need and research informed and was at the forefront of all design decisions. This meant that there needed to be pushback and changes on some copywriting decisions and graphic design elements in order to ensure the redesign was fully accessible, user-friendly, easy to navigate and left the user feeling fully informed.

+ Increase in clothes donations

+ Increase in £5 vouchers redeemed

The scheme launched officially in January 2023 online, as well as being expanded to 204 stores. Unfortunately, the deadline for the redesign was a very tight one, which didn't leave room for usability testing before going live as I would have liked. However we were able to monitor engagement on ContentSquare, and watch session recordings which show us outright if their were any pain points users were having issues with.If the timeline allowed for it, I'd launch a usability test on UserZoom to test the designs with participants before going live.