We witness it when football players take ballet. We see it when a furniture designer looks to nature for inspiration. We hear it when Tony Bennett teams up with Lady Gaga.

Unfortunately, we don’t witness this in the digital world enough. Instead of being open to a range of influences, site design processes often have a narrow focus that can result in  “me too” looks rather than differentiated designs.

How does this happen?

As part of the discovery process, companies typically limit their review of the digital landscape to direct competitors and “top sites.”  This practice is important for benchmarking and informing feature prioritization. But done alone, a competitive review can be limiting and inadvertently create a “keeping up with the joneses” effect rather than setting the stage for a differentiated experience.

How can you avoid this pitfall and create a more differentiated experience?

By expanding your circle of influence. By supplementing competitive reviews with brand spheres.

What Is A Brand Sphere?

A brand sphere is a map of your customers’  “go to” brands across verticals. It identifies the brands they choose as they go about their day and the brands you can find in their home.

What is in their refrigerator? Which labels do they wear? What car do they drive? What kind of phone do they have? Where do they eat out? Which gym do they belong to? Which hair and body care brands do they prefer?

A brand sphere draws a more complete picture of your customer. It illuminates their preferences and expectations. And it provides new fodder for inspiration.

For example, if you are designing a consumer electronics shopping site, why limit your influences to only other electronics sites or even ecommerce sites in general? Why not look at music and video sites where your consumers most likely spend more time? Why not look at the CPG sites that fall in their brand sphere? What can you learn from the news sites they visit? The social networks they use?

By looking across verticals, you will expose yourself to different design approaches and feature sets. The purpose is not to imitate these approaches but to take a step back and see if there are any distinct designs or features that spark an idea.

Undoubtedly new perspectives will fuel new ideas. Ideas that are as elegant and powerful as a football player who can both rush and plié.

Our mission for Fluid Experience has always been to make online shopping more engaging while decreasing production effort. With this in mind, we’re pleased to announce enhancements that optimize product and brand imagery presentation, regardless of the device. We accomplish this using a number of methods:

Product Displays - Our interactive product displays (zoom, color changes, views, etc.) now perform browser detection and serve up a Flash-based presentation if available. If not, we assume the user is on a touch-based tablet or smart phone and serve up an HTML presentation specifically optimized for touch navigation. For zoom, instead of forcing click-and-pan or mouse-over zoom gestures on the user, we rely on native pinch-to-zoom gestures that they already know. Plus, we do some special work behind the scenes to ensure the image stays crisp, even at multiple levels of zoom.

Shoppable Imagery – For adding interactivity to brand-based imagery, we’ve built a completely new, HTML-based component from the ground up. And don’t worry — ditching Flash doesn’t mean a loss in richness or interactivity. Our new Shoppable Image component allows for graceful crossfade and scrolling transitions. Hotspots and tooltips can contain and mix images and text. Rich fonts work out-of-the-box courtesy of Typekit. Fonts.com support is available as well.

Shoppable Video – Our Shoppable Video component detects user’s system in a similar way to Product Displays and serves up either a Flash or HTML-based presentation as appropriate.

And this is just the beginning: we see huge potential in how tablets and smart phones can really elevate the shopping experience and intend to continue to further optimize our components going into 2012. What’s more, we’ve expanded browser support so retailers can continue to upload an image once and rest assured that Fluid Experience will keep pace with the proliferation of new devices. Now and in the future.

In this case, Fluid Agency redesigned ElieTahari.com to create a beautiful, branded, and richly interactive website by layering the Fluid Experience imaging solution over the Demandware SiteGenesis ecommerce platform. We took the visual merchandising tools of Fluid Experience and raised them to a new level, seamlessly integrating them throughout the entire site in a way that complemented and enhanced the ecommerce best practices of Demandware SiteGenesis. Check out the ETC section to see how we used Fluid Experience to blend editorial content with shoppable looks. Fluid Experience isn’t just an accessory thrown on to give a static site some personality, but rather it is the fabric that holds it all together to tell the story of the products and the brand.

One of the coolest things about this project is that it also includes the first mobile site we’ve done since launching an HTML version of Fluid Experience. That means it doesn’t matter what kind of mobile or tablet device customers are using to view the site, it always looks great.

To make all this possible, the Fluid product team built completely new HTML based runtime components and corresponding business-user admin tools to create and maintain a wide variety of branding banners. They also built a Demandware cartridge for Fluid Experience to make future implementations on the platform a breeze.

From a design perspective, the challenge was to create a look and feel to match the modern sophistication of the Elie Tahari brand. Fluid’s role in helping to define the photographic direction was a key component of the design’s success. Our creative director, Mariana Bukvic, was able to be on site for the photo shoots, brief the photographer, co-art direct and guide the post-production. Often, we have to work with clients’ existing photo assets, and the fact that we were able to advise and collaborate with Elie Tahari from the start made a huge difference.

The combination of Fluid Experience, Demandware, and our strong interaction and visual design resulted in a site that was built efficiently but looks and feels completely custom. It’s like getting a perfectly tailored couture outfit without having to pawn your Bentley.

Contributors: Brian Biggs, Mariana Bukvic, Davi Ellis, and Margo Silver.

Fluid got to take the stage at eTail East’s Social Commerce Summit last week. So fun. We share our presentation with you here:

The simple fact is that lifestyle imagery is engaging and fun: just look at the stack of Williams-Sonoma or Patagonia catalogs on the average consumer’s coffee table. However, turning that imagery into something web-ready by adding copy takes too much time and specialized resources (designers) and might even detract from the imagery itself. This is disappointing because as in the offline world, vivid imagery is engaging and can both build brand and increase the chance a customer will buy that item.

Fluid Experience to the rescue…

The shoppable lifestyle imagery component of Fluid Experience allows business users to add helpful tooltips to images so your customers can find what they want more quickly. The functionality is templatized so you can preconfigure brand appropriate fonts, colors, styles, etc.  allowing your designers to rest easy knowing business-types won’t meddle with their design. Once the banner is created, it can be previewed and then deployed to your site right from the Fluid Retail admin tools allowing you to push new banners live in less than five minutes.

What’s more, you can omit tooltips and add arbitrary links to various calls-to-action throughout the banner. Finally, you can place multiple banners into a merchandiser which allows users to navigate through elegant cross-fading or scrolling.

Satisfy your user’s need for interactivity and make better use of your brand imagery. Contact support@fluidretail.com to learn more about shoppable lifestyle imagery today.

*Thank you* to the people behind the “people’s choice” Adweek Buzz Award! And special thanks to our great clients at Rachel Roy and the Jones Apparel Group. We’re thrilled to get this recognition for the facebook pop-up store for Rachel Roy!

(more on the facebook fan shop and why it worked here)

Fluid Experience’s Merchandiser component enables merchants to frequently update their site with fresh content without having to involve the IT department. Merchants simply upload content to the administrative tools, group them into a merchandiser and then deploy. The whole process takes a matter of minutes. The look and feel of the merchandiser is template based and can be configured with brand appropriate themes. This allows business users to add new content without worrying about veering off design. You can also customize the interaction your users experience, allowing them to navigate through banners with seamless cross-fading, scrolling or pagination. Our Merchandiser component can also contain shoppable lifestyle imagery and interactive SWFs for an extra degree of interactivity.

To learn more about implementing rotating banners on your site, contact support@fluidretail.com

When we think about great real world shopping experiences, there is a common theme to every flagship store and back alley pop-up shop: excellent product presentation. In the offline world, it’s guaranteed that there will be a real live product to pick up, inspect and share. You need only watch shoppers in a average apparel store to see how picking up an item, holding it up and glancing in the mirror creates an emotional attachment.

This simple act is so basic in the offline world that it’s too easy to overlook when envisioning the online experience. While best practices dictate things like the Add to Cart button being above the fold and intuitive search and browse functionality, it’s important not to lose sight of the basics:

Outstanding product presentation is a ticket to the game. Without it, consumers are may look elsewhere for this emotional attachment.

Scene 7 was kind enough to validate this philosophy in their recent “What Shoppers Want” survey. The Cliff’s Notes version is this:  shoppers want rich, vivid product imagery and the ability to browse views and colors and zoom in with simple mouse over actions. Clicking is too much work.  They want to “go big” and inspect every last detail of the product with minimal effort,  just as they would in the offline world.

At Fluid, we designed Fluid Experience from the ground up to produce rich, easy-to-use product displays that are unparalleled in the e-commerce landscape. Almost as important, we made them incredibly simple to build and change so you can experiment and find out what delights your customers.

In the spirit of going big, we took a few minutes to put together a demo that does just that. Simple mouse movements change views and expose zoom. Plus you can click View Larger for even greater detail and zoom. We think you’ll agree that it’s difficult to go back to just an average product image.

Fluid (@Fluid) recently launched two customization-themed shopping experiences for Sears: Craftsman Custom and The Garage Planner.

Craftsman Custom delivers a premium experience for consumers to tailor a pro-quality tool storage solution to their specific needs and tastes. The experience leverages 3d visualization to deliver a blueprint-like experience that progressively builds into a photo-realistic vision of the consumer’s ideal product, all in real time.

The Sears Garage Planner experience is built on inspirations and “starting point” ideas. Consumers are presented with an interactive photo gallery of shoppable and customizable garage storage solutions. The experience is simultaneously inspirational and actionable, injecting the consumer with ideas and empowering them to make them their own.

Our team has a long history designing shopping experiences for customizable products, including …

• FunStamps (the first personalizable stamps offering)
• Timberland Boot Studio (custom footwear)
• Your Reebok (custom footwear) + facebook configurator
• Design Within Reach FLOR Designer (custom carpet configurator)
• Fine Stationery (card & stationery customizer)
• Vans Customs (custom footwear)

We’re fortunate to collaborate with such great brands to innovate new shopping experiences in such a nascent field. We’re proud to be among the first who have created configurators delivering consumers real-time visualization, product rotation, share-to-phone and integrated social sharing tools.

The business benefits of a better customization experience: 200%+ increase in sales, 16+ minute average consumer engagement on-site, spikes in sharing & heavy engagement with social media customization tools.

Some recent observations, field notes, and expectations looking forward:

• Before the “economic downturn” (or whatever it’s called now), Fluid was seeing RFPs for customization up approx 5-10x showing a sharp increase in interest across industries. The recession put most of those projects on hold.

• Those brands that continued forward became increasingly strategic around customization, seeing it as a brand and business building opportunity. In many cases increasing scope and decreasing timelines in an effort to get to market quickly with robust offerings (a differentiation/barrier strategy).

• Interestingly, over half of these brands are in verticals outside of footwear.

• Embedding up-sells in the customization experience has proven so effective that some retailers are pricing base models at-or-under cost and attaching costs per attribute selection (e.g. premium colors, extra set of laces, etc.).

• Providing the consumer with simple, intuitive social tools — both providing the ability to chat real-time with friends & ability to engage one’s facebook network without ever leaving the customization experience — has become a priority among most of our clients (and now considered a best practice within Fluid).

Finally, three predictions:

1. Customization experiences will take shape in ways that are more subtle and less overt – more about great digital shopping and less about “configurators” per se. This is what most consumers want. Thoughtful experiences that embed customization vs. customization being the main draw will help launch this consumer-driven approach to digital shopping into the mainstream.
2. Customization will make the notion of a crowd-sourced economy a reality. Champion and Keds are first movers (and got a lot of brand benefit as a result + some satisfaction at beating Nike to market I’m sure
3. Customizable shopping experiences will increasingly be deployed exclusively to social channels like facebook. Customizing something lends itself superbly to a community atmosphere – expect to see brands fully leveraging all that facebook has to offer in that regard.