The Wardrobe

A mobile app and website providing the creative staff of the Royal Theater Ballet School in Odense with real-time access to the costume room's collection of over 1,000 costumes. The product was launched in February 2024.

In the background is a close-up photo of a lot of costumes hanging in a wardrobe in silver and sparkly colors. In the front is an iphone with the same photo in and the text 'The Wardrobe'.

Project duration

8 months (Jun 2023 - Feb 2024)

Client

The Royal Theater Ballet School in Odense

Team

Product Designer (myself), Full-Stack Developer

Role

As the project's Product Designer, I conducted user research through contextual inquiries, face-to-face interviews, and usability testing. I designed the app by sketching and prototyping in Figma and was responsible for implementing the design in HTML and CSS before handing it over to the project's full-stack developer.

Tools

Figma, Trello, Canva, Visual Studio Code, Google Firebase

Deliverables

The handover included the final app and a user guide with instructions on usage and sign-in details for the employees. The Royal Theater Ballet School in Odense is currently using the app's add-feature to catalog their collection of over 1,000 costumes.

Real-time access

to the magic world of the costume department

2 mockups side by side, showing the app in action. On the first screen is a page where the user put in a search word, and an animation with the logo from the royal ballet is running in the background while the search is happening. The other screen shows the items that were found.

The Problem

Keeping track of an ever-growing wardrobe, and with no overview of the costume room's content, is hard.

The Danish Royal Theater Ballet School in Odense has several perfomances during the year, with the annual Christmas performance being the most significant. Ahead of the performances and due to a limited budget, the school's creative staff spend a great deal of time discussing how they can incorporate their already existing costumes as much as possible. Prior to my involvement, they faced several issues related to how the costume room was organized:

  • the costume department lacked a specific organizational system in the costume room, relying solely on color-coding.
  • the creative staff held meetings in the school's office on the top floor, while the costume room was located in the basement.
  • they had no comprehensive overview of the costume room's contents and depended on the memory of the head of the costume department.

The Solution

Designing a wardrobe app, that gives real-time access to the costume room's collection.

Ahead of the design, I conducted a contextual inquiry and a semistructured interview with the head of the costume department to understand the challenges faced by the creative staff when working with the costumes. The research revealed several key needs:

  • a new organizational system in the costume room to make it easier to locate specific items.
  • enabling staff to hold creative meetings about the use of costumes from anywhere, by giving them online access to the costume room's inventory.
  • a cost-effective solution to fit within a limited budget.

Based on these insights, we decided to develop a solution centered around a search function, enabling the employees to find specific items using tags. Additionally, in collaboration with the head of the costume department, I designed a new organization system for the costumes, using a simple alphanumeric system for racks and shelves.

The final product

Search using specific tags. Quickly locate in the costume room.

2 mockups side by side. The first screen shows a page where an employee has put in search words in a form. The other screen shows that the employee has selected an item and where the placement of the costume is.
Dress Sequins Top Pink Tights Pearls Tutu Pointe shoes Silk Leotard Shorts Leather Skirt
Dress Sequins Top Pink Tights Pearls Tutu Pointe shoes Silk Leotard Shorts Leather Skirt

What's next?

In order to test the usability of the solution, different tests were carried out on site:

  • a usability test were conducted with the head of the costume department and a volunteer. The tests concluded that they both easily and quickly were able to find specific items in the costume room using the solution's search function. The new organizational system proved to be both practical and intuitive to use.
  • beta testing was conducted on site by me and the head of the costume department. It revealed a few issues in the system regarding the performance time of the searches, resulting in the developer working on a way to compress the images when uploading them.

Currently, an intern at the costume department is adding the remaining costumes using the app's built-in 'add' feature. Moving on from this, I will check back with the costume department after some time has passed by, to get feedback from them about the performance of the app in their daily tasks and if further improvements needs to be made. (This case only shows a small sample of the user research that has been conducted during the project. If you would like to hear more about our work, please feel free to contact me)

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