Burberry App
Design Lead . UX . UI
A luxury fashion App designed to ‘build connection’ with consumers over commerce
Burberry’s e-commerce website had been delivering significant growth, especially on mobile devices since the launch of the new design, rolled out globally. However, this new look and feel was only the beginning of what would become a huge focus on digital innovation in the luxury fashion sector.
Challenge
The main challenge was to find new ways to make sales of its products less transactional and more experiential using digital innovation and one of our key areas of focus was ‘How do we create an experience customers come back for, time and time again?
We collected insight through contextual enquiry and analytics and this informed us that healthier conversion rates following the re-design were attributed mainly to the mobile UI and UX improvements, now core journeys through the website were both aesthetically pleasing, more engaging and easy to use. The streamlined checkout, in-store lookup and the introduction of Apple Pay were also key success factors.
Process
We carried out extensive user research and testing over a 6-8 month period. We conducted moderated and unmoderated user tests covering the core App journeys defined in our discovery phase. We decided to test prototype core journeys; awareness, discovery, on-boarding, consideration, purchase and loyalty.
With these facts in mind, we wanted to focus on something that would have longevity and enough space for us to build and evolve our digital offering. We proposed a mobile App, with the potential to further engage customers and make use of the native functionality, content rich storytelling and immersive video and content, refreshed on a regular basis driving consumers’ to return on a regular basis.
Personalisation
In order to drive return visits to the App on a regular basis, we designed personalised landing pages such as the collections and homepage. Working alongside engineering, we leveraged the data we could collect to learn more about our customers tastes, wants and needs. By catering to the individual, we were able to use push notifications to bring customers back to the app where we could surface landing pages featuring content suited to their taste, increasing engagement and connection with the brand. Customers could also personalise items such as Trench Coats, Scarves, wallets and fragrances by adding their initials and viewing their personalised product right there.
Shoppable storytelling
We wanted the storytelling aspect of the app to connect with the individual and this was achieved through strategic push-notifications that drove customers’ into the app where they would arrive and see a personalised welcome message and homepage designed personally for you, as a gift from Burberry.
The app revealed intimate details about the collections and the inspiration via image and video rich story pages and behind the scenes content, only available on the app and these stories integrated interactive content that revealed on scroll or tap, with the intention of intriguing the customer and building on the experience, enticing them to explore more. Each story was book-ended with featured products from the story, driving commerce and further discovery.
Outcome
The personalised landing pages and story driven commerce, designed to make shopping feel like an experience featured video content and interactive elements that engaged visitors for long periods of time, giving customers more ways to get closer to the brand, the collections and the immersive campaigns. The content feeds were curated for customers on a semi-individual basis, giving customers’ easy access to the products and stories that would peak their interest the most. The App also featured a one-click checkout, Apple Pay and in-store lookup functionality, driving sales of its products both in App and in store.
Looking forward
The App received a lot of attention immediately after launch from both the fashion and tech industry. This led to further partnerships with Apple and integrations such as R World, connecting sales associates to customers’ in new and intimate ways. An invite-only feature, enabling VIP customers’ direct messaging with their assigned associate to make an appointment in store and allowing associates to send bespoke item recommendations to individual customers in the form of rich text messages they can buy directly from.
R world also partnered with Burberry to enhance the business facing aspect of the App, enabling the sales assistants to use an in app scanning tool to scan garment barcodes and discover how many items were left in stock and exactly which of the several storerooms it’s in.
