INDUSTRY:
LAUNDRY & DRY CLEANING
CLIENT:
PURPLETIE
YEAR:
2025
EXPERIENCE:
UX DESIGN + RESEARCH
PurpleTie
about.
PurpleTie is an on-demand laundry service offering wash-and-fold, dry cleaning, and alterations with pickup and delivery across the San Francisco Bay Area. Serving major companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, PurpleTie has operated since 1999, growing primarily through word-of-mouth. The company approached my team to modernize its iOS app to improve navigation, transparency, and overall user experience while collaborating with a student development team to ship the product within two academic quarters.
challenge.
While customers praised PurpleTie’s pricing and quality of services, qualitative and quantitative research revealed consistent usability problems. Our team divided the work to give us each a single user flow to focus on.
My job was to redesign the central user ordering flow, and from research, I identified and addressed the following critical areas:
App Navigability: Standardize component placement, improve orientation cues, and optimize for different screen sizes.
Pricing Transparency: Make pricing visible during the order process, with breakdowns for weight- and item-based services.
Brand Trust: Create a cohesive, modern interface aligned with Apple Human Interface guidelines to enhance credibility.
Constraints included client preferences, a complex pricing structure, and technical limitations, all within an eight-week design sprint before developer handoff.
results.
The redesign introduced a modular, clean design system with consistent margins, typography, and components. Key improvements included a persistent navigation bar, progress indicators, integrated service information, and optional onboarding-to-order flow. A new visual style, responsive layouts, and dark mode compatibility modernized the app while maintaining simplicity.
By project handoff, the @Home ordering flow, which was my primary focus, was fully designed in high fidelity, annotated, and developer-ready in both light and dark modes. Feedback from the client and user testing confirmed a more intuitive and transparent experience, positioning PurpleTie to launch a significantly improved app in mid-2025 to their current userbase.
prototype.
The redesigned PurpleTie app is currently in active development by the dev team and is scheduled for release on the App Store later this year.
While the final build is still underway, here is a video prototype to demonstrate the app’s core functionality, showcasing the flows for onboarding, service selection, and order placement.
