Luxury retail UX: Inspiration from culture at large
Luxury is one retail space that has continued to do well in the past couple of years, and even as physical retail is in a state of turmoil, luxury retailers are finding creative and interesting ways to draw consumers into stores. Increasingly both luxury department stores and standalone brand shops are becoming immersive experiences, with spaces designed for exploration and set up as curated showrooms of both items for sale and a wider multisensory experience around them. Retailers such as Brown’s and Selfridges for example have developed an ever-changing program of experiences to surround the shopping experience, developing ‘retail entertainment’ to blend shopping, social, dining, arts, and culture within one space.
Luxury retail is of course about more than purchasing a specific luxury item, and includes the emotional and psychological pleasure of accessing a unique visual, sensory, and service world in the process of shopping. This may include additional services such as personal shopping and knowledgeable curation of items, or the blending of broader cultural knowledge and engagement (such as art exhibitions, musicians, or a cinema) to communicate an elevated sense of social and cultural status. However, interestingly the digital luxury space still often lags behind these innovations in retail. With the ability to rapidly experiment and change digital spaces, at least more easily than a bricks-and-mortar store, there is an opportunity to bring the future of luxury into their digital retail platforms as well and make brand experiences all-encompassing, no matter what touchpoints consumers engage with. However, building an effective and distinctive digital luxury platform requires understanding the specific visual and UX codes of luxury that can be applied to websites, apps, and other digital interaction spaces.
Some brands have begun incorporating content that aligns, albeit in a limited way, with their in-store experiences, such as videos, articles, and specially curated sections of websites. Selfridges, for example, has created its own series of videos and audio content to engage with that goes beyond fashion and retail, in a section they call “Super Culture.” While this online section is less integrated in the shopping experience than the way one would walk through an art installation or past the cinema in store, the content is similarly encouraging consumers to engage with the brand as a knowledgeable curator. Likewise the ‘magazine’ website section of 1stdibs, the luxury auction site, has a subtle demonstration of the kind of exploratory experience of a luxury retail space in how the article content is laid out. The choice to feature a wide range of lifestyle content, with everything from home interiors to fragrances to fashion positions the website as a lifestyle curator, while the scrolling UX design, in which article columns are unevenly placed to encourage ongoing scrolling suggests a never-ending world into which a shopper can delve.
Balenciaga’s website goes further in integrating some of these cues into the shopping experience. On the surface, the site follows a similar design structure to a classic e-retailer, including a white background with floating images of products on top. However the navigation of products defaults to a curated mix of “highlights” rather than requiring choosing a category or even gender to shop within, and purposefully impractical overlapping text when hovering over items suggesting the act of swift purchase is not the goal (in opposition to, for example, buying basics on Amazon). Shopping by category appears at the bottom of the page, but continues to be pushed down as you scroll, providing an experience that is distinct from the practicality of shopping for a specific, needed item. Additionally, small elements featuring scrolling text and the ability to press ‘pause’ and ‘play’ introduce a subtle element of interactivity and control to shoppers. While each of these brands has found subtle ways to communicate luxury through UX, they are limited in scope and still not fully differentiated from the rest of ecommerce.
But there are also trends in luxury, beyond retail spaces, which can provide fertile ground for developing thoughtful UX design. “Experience” is key to the idea of UX, and it is worth looking to non-retail experiences as well for digital design inspiration. One trend emerging in the wider luxury space, particularly in travel and the proliferation of luxury railway travel, is an element of slowness. It is particularly in this sense of slowness that luxury retail could look to cues from the wider luxury space to communicate its unique experience and value. And indeed, in physical retail the immersive service experience is in a sense tied to this value of slowness. Part of the luxury is the fact of having time to spend in the store, to try on different items and take one’s time in enjoying the process, which provides a rich starting point for unique and innovative UX design.
The question is then how to incorporate those physical cues into digital user experience. In travel it is often quite literal, as in luxury train travel which requires more time to travel the same distance as a modern high-speed train or airplane. But the underlying value, the ability to savour the experience, is the red thread which can also be communicated digitally. While visual styles and imagery are one route, there are potentially more interactive ways to achieve this as well which can be drawn from categories tangential to luxury such as the arts and using them as a springboard for design. In the arts there are already digital design examples of this idea of slowness, often in a playful way. The artist Daniel Arsham’s portfolio website for example, is full of tricks and opaque navigation, which forces the user into near-blind exploration, or Molly Soda’s website which encourages random scrolling, with links to traditional CV and contact information nearly hidden in the content. These are perhaps extreme examples visually, but they highlight that luxury retail can look to broader culture for UX cues to match its in-person strategic development.
As younger, digitally native generations become independent luxury consumers, it is increasingly important to take the ‘phygital’ world into account, and indeed even fully digital brand touchpoints. Luxury brands can look to broader cultural understandings of what luxury means, looks, and feels like, and how these intersect with digital culture at large to create unique UX that not only aligns with a brand but positions it distinctively as a luxury experience as well.
