loro piana - redesign
Loro Piana is a truly high end luxury brand offering life-time pieces to its customers. Many of the customers have been devoted to the brand for years and once a new customer is onboarded they are expected to stay loyal to the brand for life. The clothes and accessories are chic and classy yet wearable on a daily basis. Made from rich, raw, rare materials clients don’t just own one piece, this is their ‘go to’ place for their core wardrobe.
Based in northern Italy, Loro Piana produces superlative textiles and luxury goods using the world's finest, rarest raw materials. The pursuit of excellence has been its mission for six generations.
Creation date: 1924
CEO: Fabio d’Angelantonio. LVMH
Brief
To enhance the current user experience and offer a fully responsive and immersive experience across multiple devices and locations. Delivering a streamline shopping experience from browse right through to purchase. Excellence in design and UX was key to the delivery of this website, to showcase the products to their full potential.
The Challenge
Core requirements included quick access to all products and seamless interaction between the search or browse and checkout process. Unlike other shops many items are made on request, or on a limited basis, maintaining the individuality and speciality of the brand. The 2 core users of the customer facing website were quite different:
A customer looking to wear the item. Interested in browsing and experiencing the site functionality and content as a whole. Open to cross selling and engagement through the exploration and purchase phase.
A purchaser on behalf of the wearer. Interested in searching by product name but needing far less exploration. They require a simple step process to complete the find and purchase conversion.
Beautiful Results
Clear and simple primary navigation and inpage linking was vital. Where possible full access to the catalogue of items was required within one or two clicks. Hence the need for a large complex menu with a simple clean and welcoming design. Core areas such as Knitwear and Stoles are displayed differently prompting the user visually, but also offering Loro Piana the chance to upsell products and categories due to the nature of the CMS.
Alongside the standard collection structure, in the navigation, cross selling to other areas such as shoes “The Rare Walk”, and Loro Pianas “Our Excellence” is also available. Offering a filtered version of the products by key materials and excellence.
The navigation works extremely hard offering multiple ways to browse and link into areas, collections and categories as well as a deep dive into products, without cognitive overload, due to the structure and layout of content and the taxonomy system.
In contrast to the complex navigation the search functionality could not be any easier for a user. Aimed at users looking to find specific products by name or product code the search is large, clean, simple and suggestive. It uses descriptive prompts and hand holding techniques to guide the user through easily. Images tell a thousand words, so the product images are brought into the search to aid the user, alongside the product code.
Responsibilities & Achievements
Lead IA
Collaboration with BA's, Designers and Developers delivering client objectives into meaningful interactive experiences
User Needs investigation and requirement development
User Centered Design approach incorporating the results at each stage
Waterfall approach delivering concise documents to the client team
Creation and delivery of system process flows, navigation design and technical wireframes using Azure and Omnigraffle
Delivery of UX System to extended client team, across multiple countries
Seamless remote and on site working
User Experience Process
A combined waterfall and agile approach was adopted for this project starting with the UX analysis, and priority of business and user needs, along with a competitor analysis. A clear set of objectives was met at regular intervals during the project lifecycle, and approval from the client was required to move on to each new stage of the project. A consistently high level of investigation, clear justification/proof of results and ongoing communication was maintained throughout the project and across all teams.
Loro PIana already had a client facing website and the aim was to overhaul this, developing a completely new, fresh and enticing user experience, without pushing the brand too far from its historical excellence. The result clearly shows both the excellence of the brand and the website development.
