Covet Fashion–an online fashion styling game beloved by 2.5 million users worldwide and one of iOS’ top grossing apps–recognized that their users were misusing the skin tone feature, intended to promote diversity. Instead, many players were abusing this tool to sway other players’ voting preferences or increase chances for winning style challenges by choosing lighter skinned models.

To address this, the company redesigned their feature to only show options for darker-skinned models and reduced the maximum score that users could earn per look, to hopefully lower the likelihood that high scorers opt for cheaper garments with poorer quality. They have also taken steps to ensure skin tone features don’t become visible by other users and invited women of color onto their community advisory board that will develop inclusive design principles in future updates.

Crowdstar, a game startup, took an intentional approach when designing their fashion-focused game Covet Fashion: conducting extensive market research with its target audience and using Game Thinking–a customer-centric design methodology–to build it.

The team interviewed fashionistas to gain insight into their interests, motivations and behaviors to inform game mechanics and ensure maximum engagement – ultimately creating an outstanding success with over 2.5 Million Monthly Active Users even after 10 years since launch!

Recently, the company reintroduced their “Threading Change” initiative, designed to support Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) small businesses within fashion industry. They are seeking entrepreneurs willing to serve as mentors; four winners will each receive $10,000 grants. Applicants can submit applications here.