Mys Tyler, the social-shopping app supporting women of all shapes and sizes
Mys Tyler is an Instagram-inspired, social-shopping app designed for women. It uses a body-matching algorithm to pair users with body-relevant content creators. Helping them discover, and shop, fashion inspiration from like-bodied women.
The feel-good app had been live for about a year when I came onboard. It had found an instant connection with women who were tired of cookie-cutter influencers but it needed to lock in the next round of funding to stay afloat.
I closely collaborated with the small team, which included the founder, Community Manager, UX Copywriter, and Lead Developer, to brainstorm and develop features within a rapid release model.
Scope
UI / UX Design
User interviews
User testing
Product roadmap
Prototyping
Developer handovers
Defining the audience
We categorised our female-identifying audience into two groups: Users, who are women struggling to decide what to wear, and Contributors, who are fashion-confident women enthusiastic about sharing their outfits.
Contributors were our power users, logging in on average eight times more often and actively engaging in the fashion space across various platforms.
Our personas/archetypes were a great reference point when developing new initiatives and user flows.
Daily Inspo feature
The founder wanted to introduce a feature that encouraged users login into the app everyday After brainstorming with the team I suggested Daily Inspo, a daily outfit prompt that got women excited to get out of their wardrobe rut.
The feature marked a big uptick in engagement for Mys Tyler. Following its launch in March 2022 the app saw significant engagement growth, from 26k Monthly Active Users (MAU) in Q1 to 60k MAU in Q4 of 2022.
Improved discover
Data showed users were more likely to return to the app if they followed 6 or more contributors. However, many users expressed that they struggled to find women who looked like them and had enviable style.
The enhanced Discover leveraged common app patterns and gave users more options for body-relevant contributors. A kebab menu allowed users to hide unappealing contributors, solving the issue of a stagnant discover feed.
Adding filters to the feed
120,000+ outfits had been posted and tagged but the content wasn’t searchable. Users told us they’d like to find outfits for a specific occasion.
I explored and prototyped 4 potential filter flows. After internal testing, a simple, single screen overlay was chosen as the easiest to implement and use.
UI uplift
The first updates went hand-in-hand with front-end style updates. Out with brown and beige and in with black and white.
Old Discover
New Discover
Old Profile
New Profile
Commission as a path to revenue
A substantial insight from user interviews was that Contributors didn’t know they could earn commissions through the app, and Users didn’t understand that they could shop through the app.
To help resolve this we introduced the following:
- A searchable, scrolling list of brands replaced a low-engagement blog tab in the main navigation.
- Brands that could earn commission were highlighted pink and the commission percent listed.
- Brand linked through to brand landing pages which had previously been hard to find organically.
- In late 2022 we published commission earned amounts on contributor profiles.
Surfacing fresh, quality content
Six months after the release of Daily Inspo engagement numbers were stagnating. Mys Tyler needed to keep evolving but make smart decisions to get optimal impact for the least amount of technical spend.
Surveys had confirmed two things:
- Content felt stale quickly
- Badly lit, poorly composed images gave the app a low-quality feel.
Focusing on the insight that ‘Classic Users want to be told what to wear’, my copy-writing partner and I pitched the idea of an Inspo Tab.
From here Daily Inspo could be launched along with a constantly updating array of ‘edits’. Edits were curated from a selection of tags and past Daily Inspos. The new tab gave users a shortcut to what’s on trend and how to wear it. It featured only quality, curated images and made the app overall more visually appealing.
Outcome
The team and I were proud to put out 14 app releases in 2022 (not including bug fixes) with more features in approved in Figma for future releases. Despite best efforts the app didn’t attract funding in that time and it wound down into maintenance mode in April 2023. I hope it continues to foster body-inclusive fashion in its mission to represent all bodies.
If I could give this App more stars I would. The concept is amazing. Real women being able to see clothing on other women of similar body shapes and size etc takes the hassle out of online shopping and helps in so many ways.
@curveycartel
