Incorporating Transparency and Education into Fast Fashion’s Digital Experience

🌱 Bringing the Roots Above Ground: Rethinking Sustainability Transparency in Fast Fashion

In today’s sustainability landscape, the burden of exposing unethical practices often falls on users, through watchdog platforms, viral exposés, or “gotcha” moments that uncover greenwashing. But what if transparency wasn’t something users had to hunt for? What if it was built into the shopping experience?

This project explores how fast fashion brands can take responsibility by embedding honest, accessible sustainability information into their digital interfaces. I began with a core assumption: most users don’t support unethical brands, they just lack the time or knowledge to make better choices.

My Hypothesis

• If users can’t trust what they see, they won’t engage.

• If information is overwhelming, they’ll skip it.

• But if sustainability is clear, accessible, and on their terms, they’ll care more.

This research calls for brands to bring sustainability out of the shadows and into the UI, where users can actually see, trust, and act on it.

What I Found

✳️ Price beats principles, but trust still matters

Most people I surveyed bought under 10 new clothing items last year. Still, they leaned toward greenwashed brands like Shein. Why? Price and style. One respondent said, “Unfortunately, it’s not about practices, but prices.”

Yet 93.8% said they’d still shop at a fast fashion brand even if it stopped pretending to be sustainable. That’s a clear window: drop the greenwashing, keep the honesty.

🧪 Usability Testing: Sustainability shouldn't feel like detective work

Users struggled to find clear sustainability info on Shein, everything felt buried or vague. CHNGE had better structure but used jargon like “GOTS-certified” and “regenerative cotton” without context. Both sites made users feel either suspicious or out of their depth.

🧠 MoSCoW Prioritization: Users want impact, but also ease

In ideation, participants suggested features like “Impact Tabs” on product pages, better care instructions, and visual sustainability scores. But the facilitation of the activity led to some inconsistent results, I realized next time, we’d need tighter framing to help users compare features more effectively.

📚 Secondary Sources Backed It All Up

I found solid academic support that greenwashing thrives under weak regulation, and that consumers are confused by too many vague sustainability definitions. (Delmas & Burbano, 2011; de Freitas Netto, 2020.) And like my surveys, research showed most fast fashion shoppers are driven by cost and aesthetics, not ethics.