With the increased online activity of luxury consumers and a demand for virtual brand encounters, User Experience (UX) design remains the key to achieving a brand’s online conversion goals, whether they are loyalty, connection, sales, or other objectives of strategic importance.
User Experience design is a discipline based on human – computer interaction and strives to honor users’ and brands’ needs and ambitions on a single platform in a variety of ways.
User engagement and intuition are attained through clever design of brand websites, following a set of 5 dominant factors that we consider the elements for successful UX design.
1. Engagement through Usability
The basis of a rewarding episode is usability, the ease with which participants can navigate, experience, and utilize functionalities. Besides creating elements that are visually attractive, the design should serve the purpose of making the platform user-friendly.
Only if a customer understands how to control and operate a website will he or she be able to engage with the information and the features that the website offers.
2. Intuition through Information Design
Information design involves closely examining the audience of your website and their needs in terms of content and capacity. As a discipline, Information Design aims to make sure users can find what they want, and more importantly, understand it once they arrive at their desired piece of content.
Relevance of information and capability are growing needs of online consumers, and new technologies allow us to capitalize on these desires by pushing items related to the content with which the individual interacts. The semantic web is a development that facilitates this trend. It allows for the grouping of information that is about “like topics”. Read more about the semantic web in our article, “understanding web 3.0 through 3 key terms.”
By placing information in a relevant context and design, we enable users to quickly understand it. Information Design seeks for a presentation of the content that users can inherently trust and that motivates further action towards brand websites’ conversion goals.
3. Structure through Information Architecture
Information architecture seeks to categorize material in a structure that is rapidly understood. It predominantly applies to complex information systems, even though it is an integral element to consider for smaller websites, too.
While adding content and capacity, the number of pages and content items on a single website increases and a clever framework is necessary to optimize site-flow. Astute site-flow can guide users to instinctively follow an obvious path set by the brand, which also allows for the attainment of conversion targets.
4. Brand Experience through Visual Design
Visual Design should be the only goal for every luxury brand manager. Through Visual Design we imagine the brand’s values, and attempt to create a virtual version of the exclusive brand experience that customers find offline. The mystique of a fashion house and its privileged character are to be represented by the stunning design of illustrated elements that make up the website. Typography, photography, colors and shapes (i.e. button styles), and also audiovisual elements (such as video) should reflect the brand’s identity and be in line with the image that people have in their minds when they think of the brand.
5. Interact through Interaction Design
The internet has gained incredible success as a media because of its interactive nature. Throughout the last decade, we have seen an enormous shift from a content-focused design to highly interactive concepts that allow customers and brands to establish relationships. Interaction Design seeks the perfect combination of capacity and encouragement that propels users to interact, and thereby initiates or develops a relationship with the brand, whether it is commercial or social.
Design Strategy
Every luxury fashion house is bound to shape an online strategy based on the defined objectives that brands desire to achieve through their websites. A consistent UX design strategy should also work to ensure that everything collectively moves toward those goals.
This recipe uses 5 ingredients. As a brand, you can decide to engage with specialists, or to visit the nearest supermarket to get the full-range of options in a single trip. Wherever you decide to go, make sure that all ingredients are present to prepare the perfect experience, and to achieve the goals in your relationships with the guests of your exclusive party.
Author: Roeland de Jong
Copy Editor: Gina Conforti
Photo credits: Susie Adams
