What does it mean to buy something? And why can it sometimes hurt?
Spreedom is a web-based application designed to minimize the self-shaming that young adult women experience following impulsive spending while encouraging more mindful and intentional shopping habits.
I aimed to augment the shopping experience by integrating a reflective space to address negative emotional responses. This project was undertaken as my undergraduate thesis through a six-month agile research and design process.
In its simplest form, impulse buying is just purchasing something without having planned it. This does not have to refer to a new shirt; an impromptu coffee break at a new café also counts. There is nothing inherently wrong with impulse shopping.
The issue lies in how people feel afterwards. 52% of people report feeling shame, guilt, the violation of their personal standards, and hindsight bias. This overwhelmingly negative response denotes a significant pain point in the buying process.
Young adult women have multiple factors working against them regarding impulsive spending. Women view shopping as an overall experience; whether shopping in person or online, retailers often know how to take advantage of this.
Women spend more time shopping, yet they spend less than men on impulse purchases—typically half as much. Despite this, they experience a higher frequency of buyer's remorse, denoting a need for tailored intervention for this audience.
This problem space posed a unique challenge in that both the problem and its cause were intertwined and highly nuanced, so I conducted my ideation and discovery phases simultaneously.
I took what I knew about the negative emotional response and worked backward, uncovering what factors contribute to impulse buying, unpacking these feelings, and overcoming them.
Interviews with 18 participants revealed that people view impulse purchases as unreasonable until they are determined to have a purpose, even one as nondescript as self-care.
This also revealed a double standard that all participants were unaware of. Even though people viewed impulsive shoppers as irresponsible, the behaviour itself was not seen as destructive. Instead, the purpose behind the purchase determined whether or not the consumer was viewed in a bad light.
The first step was establishing a point of failure: when do people start noticing that they don't feel good about their shopping decisions, and when do we need to intervene?
I held a co-creation workshop to learn about these experiences from 14 women aged 18-28.
A pattern emerged: people started feeling bad after realizing how much they spent, and this feeling was entirely self-inflicted for 79% of participants. This finding was consistent across all hypothesized temporary, situational, and permanent scenarios.
The shopper is not the only party "at fault" when purchasing impulsively.
Retailers often use different strategies to encourage shoppers to buy, and it's not always about consumer preferences. These tactics can range from simple prompts to not miss out on a "good deal" to the strategic placement of displays next to a checkout desk.
The concept of the hedonic treadmill is essential here. When we make a purchase, our dopamine levels increase, and when we feel bad about it, we want to do something that will bring them back again, thus trapping us in a negative feedback loop.
During my initial explorations into the problem space, I thought a budgeting app was the solution to preventing impulse shopping. However, usability testing revealed that this promoted a notion of scarcity in participants, which only worsened this negative feedback loop.
I learned that to combat this problem, I had to restructure how people view impulse shopping. Essentially, I was fighting a social stigma that people were generally inflicting on themselves.
Anger management techniques aim to control initial reactions and respond socially appropriately, and a critical component of this is the use of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
I needed users to regularly interrupt their usual thought patterns to stop inflicting shame and guilt on themselves, and CBT techniques were designed to do this exact thing.
A critical concern was that my solution needed more features to warrant being a standalone application. Alternatively, opening a separate website and mandating awareness to realize when one's thoughts are cognitive distortions does not fit the product's use case.
My product requires consistent usage, implying the necessity of native functionality to increase effectiveness. I found that an email widget is the most effective implementation, allowing the user to access the web app when desired without needing to purposely open it.
Drawing from CBT techniques, I implemented aspects from both play and art therapy into the interface because they're proven to reduce stress in the heat of the moment and provide a way for users to reflect indirectly. It's less interrogative and acts as a distraction and a way for users to process their feelings.
The depicted brand language guidelines encompass my attempts at creating a colour palette that worked to build an air of playfulness and comfort.
I selected rounded, more geometric fonts because of how they interact with our visual understandings and perceptions of joy. I achieved this through a tertiary colour palette with contrasting tones to ensure WCAG accessibility standards were met.
Spreedom is an email extension for mobile email applications. The integration provides users with a reflective space to address their emotions after making a purchase.
The included activities use cognitive behavioural therapy techniques to minimize the shame people inflict on themselves after impulse spending.
Through completing these exercises, users begin the process of cognitive restructuring to create a long-lasting shift in how they treat themselves and their wallets!
The email widget is mainly invisible, showing up only when the user views a receipt.
This is when negative emotions rush forward, and having an immediate reminder to reflect minimizes the progression of negative thought processes and cognitive distortions.
This helps achieve the objective of beginning the cognitive restructuring process without being acutely aware of it so as not to scare users away.
The reflection activity is a short series of game-like questions where users are told to tap their hearts out, pop bubbles, and unleash their inner artist. The activities are light-hearted takes on tactics designed to combat cognitive distortions, enabling users to reflect on their emotions through play.
This achieves the sought benefit of building a judgment-free space for reflection.
The activity asks users to reflect on their worst-case scenarios and whether they'd be genuinely terrible and brainstorm how to overcome them.
By planning their next steps, users can minimize the continuation of self-shaming behaviour and instead focus on areas for growth and the next steps.
This achieves the objective of minimizing the negative emotional response that occurs after impulse purchasing.
Regarding specific areas for growth, I'd like to see this solution's long-term impact. Ideally, this would be done through a diary study to see if this perspective is one that people can genuinely adopt and carry with them.
The next part of this solution that I'd like to target is constructing the onboarding experience within the product itself, as this is a critical timeframe in which I could both bring awareness to the social stigma surrounding impulse shopping and set the tone for the user's experience learning against it.
Here’s some more of my projects to explore!
Designed with ♠ by Jasmine Bhogal