The Official Fluid Blog

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An article in The New York Times this morning headlines that luxury brands, once wary of the web, are now embracing it. The most interesting piece is on Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative officer: “…high-end brands should go further in trying to give Web stores the rich texture of physical stores. ‘Whether they are walking into our store on Bond Street or tapping in from India or China, it’s about making sure the consumer is getting the same experience…’”

This resonates. Fluid’s philosophy on designing customer experience is that sometimes it’s good to go outside.

When you do, stop by REI’s Seattle flagship store in Seattle. A 3-story high climbing wall dominates the entry. There’s a rain room, a bike trail, a hiking boot test course, and a JanSport play treehouse swarming with marauding children. The interior design and finish details are rustic and rough-hewn, evoking a carefully architected outdoors experience.

Virgin Megastore in Hollywood has 100+ interactive kiosks that offer as much entertainment value as they do access to inventory. And it’s a great place to see bands. And, of course, there’s always Apple. You get the idea.

The point: these elements of the in-store experience are not about thrusting product at the consumer at every opportunity.

Rather, the objective is to create an “emotional moment” with the customer — immersive, uniquely branded and entertaining. Experiences designed to meaningfully connect with the customer. And, by doing so, foster a deeper relationship with the brand, a gratifying experience, and eventually more sales.

Most online retail sites aren’t especially fun. They are usable, clean and bright. Super functional, searchable, and safe. But compared with real-world shopping, they are sterile. Today’s e-commerce sites are like retail spaces 25 years ago: white boxes, bad lighting, uninspired fixtures. Products are well organized and findable but there’s not much retail therapy happening.

The evolution of the in-store experience will absolutely be echoed in the digital realm in one form or another and then taken further than it can be in the physical world. It is inevitable. The online store will soon be the ultimate “full price” flagship, a store experience fueled by interactivity and media, free from the constraints of square footage and physics.

Proof points: Fluid’s recent launches for Vera Wang Princess and Craftsman Customizable Tool Storage

Whether or not brands are ready to embrace this point of view, consumers are demanding it.

Fluid is excited to announce the launch or new site for Calvin Klein Fragrances, http://www.calvinkleinfragrances.com/. Fluid has been working with the Calvin Klein Fragrances team for several months to develop a new site that integrates the entire Calvin Klein fragrance line into a single, unified site experience while allowing each brand to express its own individuality. Individual fragrances include ck one, eternity, obsession, euphoria, escape and the latest addition to the line, ck free.

Several years ago, I had the “misfortune” of being introduced to my first digital SLR camera. I was immediately hooked and since then I’ve been suffering the same symptoms as all other camera hobbyists: a compulsive need to purchase (or drool over) expensive camera accessories and gear. So when I “need” more camera gear, I’ll go online to shop because, aside from the obvious convenience factor, I like the ability to bargain hunt and easily research products. But with so many online camera retailers out there, it’s getting pretty hard to differentiate between the sites. They all sell the same products, offer the same product information, in a similar layout. So when I do my research, I’m usually looking for two things – product price and customer product reviews. These are the two main components that really help me determine whether the product is highly recommended at a price point I’m comfortable with – which ultimately affects my decision to buy. But are there other things that retailers can do to help differentiate themselves above the rest? (more…)

Parametric Navigation…it’s really just a fancy industry phrase for a filtered search, or parameters you can select to filter down results sets. So if I go to widgets.com and search for a widget, the site would present me with options to narrow my widget selection by price or rating or size or color, etc. The overall idea is that I can pick the individual attributes that appeal to me, and come up with a customized list of widgets that meet my specific needs. It’s my preferred search method, so I figured I’d tell you what I think works, and what falls flat.

I started with the list of Internet Retailers 2009 Hot 100 Retail Web Sites. I don’t quite understand how they came up with this list, given that some of these sites look like they haven’t been redesigned since the ’90s, but it seemed like a good baseline to use for my research.

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My initial goal was to research and write a blog on sneakers, the sneaker culture, and what drives a ‘sneakerhead’ to seek the most limited/hard to get/wait-in-line-for-2 days type sneakers. But as I set out on my task to contribute to the Fluid blog, I stumbled onto the site miadidas.com. I say ‘stumbled’ because I have not heard or seen much about this site. I knew about NikeID, YourReebok(formerly known as RBKCustom), and the newly updated Vans Custom site among others, but was surprised and somewhat disappointed about just discovering the custom site for Adidas shoes. I’ve seen the in-store experience at the Adidas store in San Francisco, but was not aware it was migrated to the web – or at least a version of it.

With that said, I decided to focus my attention to the site and give my personal review. (more…)

The other night I let my son configure a pair of Vans slip-ons for his 6th birthday. Watching him and his 3 year old brother navigate the process was informative. Two key things I observed:

• My son moused-over every single option for every single product part (not kdding…he methodically moused over every option). This was only possible because Fluid Configure uses client-side technology (Adobe Flex in this case) to do the image previewing, meaning you don’t need a round trip to the server to generate the image.  Using server-side imaging technology this could take an hour or more.
• My 3 year old son asked, “Can we turn it over?” Specifically, even as an observer to the process he wanted to view the product from multiple perspectives. While Vans doesn’t feature the incredible rotation of Your Reebok, but it does show the product from multiple views with great responsiveness.

Overall it was gratifying to see them  quickly grasp the experience, move through the configuration process and take great pleasure from the emails and SMS’s they were able to send letting their family know about the shoes they had just designed. If only the design of their shoes could have been so positive.

At Fluid we’ve delivered some interesting work in the past: Timberland’s Build Your Own Boot Studio (BYOB) was a breakthrough in product configuration, offering instant color change and the first rotation of a custom product. Reebok built upon this by allowing two axes of rotation as well as allowing shoppers to configure a product on a lifestyle photograph. The recent launch of the new Vans configurator, is one of the most exciting client launches during my time at Fluid.

The Vans work builds on many of our learnings of the past years:

• Designing a custom product is stressful. One of the biggest impediments to custom product sales has been the inability to get immediate validation on a design in real time. In the Vans configurator a shopper can send a link to a friend via instant messenger (or email). When the user clicks the link they’ll be brought into a collaborative shopping session where they can share design ideas and give feedback in real time. We believe this will not only increase sales but bring new shoppers to the Vans site.
• Product configuration is an iterative undertaking. We’re providing users a simple “Scratchpad” where they can save their designs in progress for easy reference without logging in. With the scratchpad users can save a design with a single click and return to a previous design just as quickly.
• All of this functionality is part of the Fluid Retail product suite, utilizing both Fluid Configure and Fluid Social. This means we’ll be able to deploy the technology faster and more cost effectively for future customers looking to create similar collaborative shopping experiences.

We couldn’t be more excited to share this client work with you…keep your eyes peeled for future deployments of Fluid Social collaborative shopping deployed in support of collaborative shopping for traditional, mainline products.

A key aspect of Fluid’s user-centric design approach is to engage in usability research early on in the design process. One key element of our approach is to administer usability tests using interactive low-fidelity prototypes. Throughout the years, Fluid has developed a unique technique of developing richly interactive prototypes by adding HTML, CSS and JavaScript within Adobe Fireworks to create click through prototypes that are easy to use, manage and update.

Recently, Adobe asked Fluid to share our approach of rapid prototyping with the Adobe Fireworks and Adobe Dreamweaver developer’s community and we were both honored and excited to do so.

Our in depth article, “Rapid interactive prototyping with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using Fireworks and Dreamweaver CS4″, can be found on Adobe’s website here:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/rapid_interactive_prototyping.html

Social Design Principle #4 – Participate in Active Listening

Utilizing social design principles to improve a customers shopping experience has the potential to bring tremendous benefit to a company and its customers.  However, no matter what conversations take place, there are two key components essential to the fourth principle: active listening:

• Maintain your commitment to having conversations – companies must be dedicated to maintaining their social channels to keep content fresh and new.
• Admit your mistakes, and do something about them – part of having authentic conversations is being prepared to accept negative feedback and to do something about it.

Maintain your commitment to having conversations.
Social Design is only powerful when the content is new. Customers will not participate in a conversation if there are very few others or if the thread is old.  If there is little or no activity, then people are not likely to participate.  Therefore, companies must be prepared to maintain their blogs, video and photo galleries, Twitter broadcasts, Facebook groups, and whatever myriad of social technologies they choose to pursue.
More importantly, companies  need to mean every word they say.  If a company promises to modify a product or improve a service in response to an upset customer, they must do so. Engaging customers then failing to follow through and deliver on those promises damages the company’s brand, reputation, and credibility.

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Social Design Principle #3 – Appeal to the Unique Individual

Social Design can recommend products in a smarter, more relevant way that appeals to your customers’ unique individuality.  It is more powerful to present a customized list of items “We think YOU will like…” rather than simply presenting “Related Items.”

Previously we discussed the value of customer reviews as a source of unbiased product information, but in some cases they may be puzzling or less useful to customers. Reviews may have less value when shopping for certain types of products. Books, movies, clothes, and shoes are often reviewed based solely on personal preference. While one person may love a movie, another may hate it.  With this in mind, how do customers find or know what is relevant to them?  Making better connections between customers and products requires a better recommendation system to identify items that will appeal to the unique individual:

1. Personalize the Recommendation– Present recommendations in a context relevant to the individual, and they will be more likely to engage with your products.
2. Build Customer Reputation – Encourage participation by allowing customers to earn a reputation for themselves in the context of the rest of the community.
3. Give users a “Me” page –Give customers a unique space dedicated to content meaningful to their shopping habits. This can be a valuable tool and help inform purchasing decisions.

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