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July 23, 2005
A wearable web experience
While American Apparel is making efforts to become the new GAP, small venues like Defunker do more with tees made by American Apparel. T-shirts that make you happy is their slogan.
It's unclear to me what American Apparel wants to be. It's like a brand with an identity crisis. American Apparel's brand design reminds me of the purism of London based designers, slick, cold and very reduced. But the brand experience you get by visiting their site and when you're actually buying something online, is way different: Lots of cluttered elements crunched into small space. There is no consistent use of elements, no design language (icons compete with links in different colors) and it's confusing to get video with some items and only pictures with others.
There's more to the problem. American Apparel products are as dull as it gets. Some call them boring, others say they are refreshingly simple. It may be part of the success story that clothes by American Apparel can be combined with everything. But not all of it is equally boring. Some of the items feature nice cuts and interesting combinations of colors and materials. It seems obvious that American Apparel is a label that wants to break out of its own dullness. It's almost like a couple that's been together for a while and now they want to freshen up their sex life.
A closer look at American Apparel's website reveals severe problems with usability and user experience:
- 11 global navigation links
- 35 marketing entry point links, that is 32 too many
- 1 site map link
- Slide shows of Bangkok bikes and Hong Kong housing mixed with fashion shoots are sexy to art directors, but confusing to customers
I think American Apparel could use a Brand Manager, or a Creative Director with background and experience in usability and user experience. Someone who helps them to develop a conceptual direction and who starts building a brand structure and a visual language for the young company that is based on user (read consumer) research. It just doesn't look like they're aware of this need.
After Amazon's successful book store concept was expanded to include consumer electronics and apparel, more consumer fashion labels dared to jump over the GAP between consumers who are not going to their physical stores but their virtual counterparts. And not surprisingly, users of the net behave the same way they do in the real world. So they're essentially expecting the same kind of shopping experience they get in a physical store. While almost all of the bigger brands get online sales right technologically (or at least functionally working), only few companies realize the importance and relativity of an online shopping experience and browsing through racks of clothing.
When you enter a clothing store, you are allowed to act intuitively. Every kid knows how to pick up a tee and try it on. But how do you try on a piece of clothing on the web? Early pop ups of the brief but intense dot-com era died because of this problem: the lack of user experience. The web can be anything you want as it seems, but can it replace a mirror?
I can see Flash designers rising their hands, waving their fingers eargerly, pointing out you can just hook up a webcam and with a little Flash tweaking and a heavy duty database in the backbone you can create the ultimate user experience. Sure you can, once people have all the same screen with the same resolution, using the same intuitive interface (hint, it will have an X in its name but no P, and it won't be Asta la Vista either—just kidding), and they all have web cams built in their computers. But until we are there, our t-shirt shops have filed insolvency.
What does it take to make the selling experience an actual fashion store experience online? Most sites are kind of getting there, but they don't seem to get it yet. Usability is something that has gained recognition only in the past two, three years. It was the foundation for earlier generations of designers (remember "form follows function"?). Now the economy finally awakes, realizing that user experience translates to business.
Start looking at your customers, your users. Sure, they want just to buy a simple t-shirt, or a pair of jeans. Sure, they want an easy shopping process. But they want to get the feeling for it too. Make them forget they don't look at a mirror. Don't confuse them too much. Let your website be smooth, soft and silky. Make it wearable.
This is more about ideology than it is about the design process. Sure it's important to brief your web shop designers right. Of course it is about good information architecture as well. Testing groups are a decent way to evaluate results. Trouble is, if you lack the philosophy and can't resolve what is important out of what isn't, then you don't know how to transform your testing results into an improved user experience and you won't need any programmers or designers.
So if you're an online fashion vendor, you have a product line of clothing. In real life, no other product comes that close to skin of your customers. Books can touch me inside, but clothing actually is touching me on the outside. And as a user of your stuff, I'm taking great care in only letting touch my skin what is worth it and represents part of me. Your clothes, in other words, are my expression as a user (always remember formerly called consumers are now users since they're using the web and expect the same quality from a web experience they expect from your products).
If you're a fashion vendor, you know I will let your product touch my skin. It may sound like a given, so we don't have to think about it in daily business. But if you think about it, that's as close as it gets. Quite an intimate story between fashion vendor and user.
In a store, in real life, I will browse through your racks anonymously. A sales girl may ask me if I find what I'm looking for, but that's about it. I want privacy when I'm looking, I want to be able to focus and I want to find surprises among your racks. Even when I'm looking for a jacket, I wouldn't say no to a nice top if it hits my eye.
Thinking like this, analyzing the store browsing experience may lead to the creation of a better web experience. There are some things more or less online stores have in common, but the list is short. In general, browsing for clothes, for fashion, is an entirely different experience than going to shop for groceries, especially online.
Resources:
American Apparel
Defunker
Neighborhoodies
Threadless
KD Dance
webcredible.co.uk: Ten ways to improve the usability of your ecommerce site
Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox: Usability —Empiricism or Ideology?
Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at July 23, 2005 12:14 PM
Comments
fascinating piece.
not a 18-hour day goes by at neighborhoodies that we're not fighting tooth and nail to make it better and better. tomorrow, monday aug. 1, we launch a bunch of new steps - we've been brainstorming them for 6 months and have big changes rolling out continuously the rest of the year. it's come a long way since I built, less than 3 years ago, the first neighborhoodies site. we plan to stay in the lead of usability, so stay tuned.
-michael,
founder, the neighborhoodies
Posted by: michael at July 31, 2005 03:02 PM
Belgian t-shirt shop Skwat uses Flash to run a relatively intuitive but simple e-commerce system. It's a bit awkward to learn, due to some basic interface functions that don't indicate what they're doing unless you click them. Plus, the font is too small, but because it's Flash you can't hit the larger font button of your browser. To get it, you have to click around a bit and adopt the functionality of this interface before you can actually use it. After an initial learning curve, you can happily shop away. Now, if they had a larger collection of these super cool designs—that would make me come back more often.
Posted by: Henning at August 18, 2005 07:33 AM
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