Luxury made accessible from the comfort of your home

When talking about luxury clothing, most of us imagine a fancy fashion house, where customers shop for exclusive garments. However, even the most luxurious experience does not guarantee them finding the perfect fit based on their body type or style preferences. Besides, no one wants to see their new favorite piece being worn by someone else at the same event unless they want to be featured in a “Who Wore It Better” article. This is one of the many reasons people prefer to go to their favorite designers to have a custom outfit made especially for them. But what if your favorite designer lives across the globe? Or what if you don’t have time to constantly go for a fitting?

NB44 came up with the perfect solution and needed our help to bring it to life. They thought of a digital experience which would help its users receive an exclusive collection of custom-made garments every season, while being able to register both their size and their style preferences through the NB44 application without having to leave the comfort of their home. The app would also allow its users to order exclusive garments for a special event they plan to attend with the help of their very own digital concierge.

Understanding the online luxury space to build a competitive product

The client came to us with a clear vision on what they wanted the application to be like. Our task was to take that vision, improve it by using our expertise in the field and translate it into a user-friendly experience accessible even to our less tech-savvy users.

In order to align with the client and understand the product we were going to build, we conducted a number of workshops to make sure we were fully equipped with all the information necessary to build a competitive product.

We analyzed the competitors in our problem space to learn more about the trends in the luxury fashion market in order to adopt their best practices and fix any gaps in the user experience when building our product. We audited 12 competitor websites, including Banana Republic, Christian Dior and Chanel.

Getting to know our users to build a user-centric experience

In order to better understand who we will be buildings this product for, we conducted some user interviews with potential users to understand their goals, needs, pain points and frustrations. Some common goals and needs they mentioned were having a personal stylist, being able to receive luxury clothing at your doorstep, etc. Some of the frustrations points most of our participants mentioned were uncertainty towards ongoing trends, bad advice towards their personal style, etc.

Based on our findings we identified three user personas for this product: The Royalty, The Self-Made Man and The Decision Maker. This helped us gain a different perspective on the product and show empathy when making important design decisions.

Creating a seamless experience which addresses our users’ needs

The biggest challenge we had when creating the low-fidelity wireframes was to come up with a seamless onboarding experience which would not overwhelm our users while letting the NB44 team collect enough information about them to be able to create their collection. The onboarding consisted of two parts – the one where users registered their interest of wanting to join NB44 and the in-app onboarding, where we were to collect their payment and size information. During our interviews some of our users admitted finding questionnaires incredibly challenging, so we had to keep this in mind to be able to present the onboarding questions in a fun and engaging manner.

Making the two parts of the onboarding stylistically different when it came to both the visuals and the interactions was one of the many ways we made the process more engaging. We also made sure to include as few open ended questions as possible, so that the user can move to the next step with a single click. Additionally, we included fun animations and interactions to spark user interest and make this onboarding experience unique.

Creating a compact design system

As we moved into the high fidelity phase, the NB44 team gave us all the important branding assets, including the logo, the colors and the fonts they wanted us to use when designing the experience. This gave us a solid base when starting to build the design system. The challenge however was to make sure that the assets of the physical brand looked good within the actual digital product and complimented the clothing line itself.

We decided to treat these creative constraints as an opportunity to make the brand assets pop among other components and become a unanimous part of the experience. We had to slightly modify the color hues and the typography to comply with the accessibility guidelines, as well as make sure that the typography matched the overall look and feel of the application. Additionally, when building certain components, such as progress bars, pop-ups, navigation items, etc., we had to ensure that they speak to the brand and compliment the NB44 logo, the sketches provided by the client and so on.

Turning our client’s vision into a refined experience

Using the mood boards the client provided us with as an inspiration, we started to design the high fidelity screens by making sure the visual experience translates the luxury of the brand itself. We wanted to keep the visuals as minimalistic as possible so that the elements do not conflict with the images of the garments themselves which were supposed to stand out. We decided to incorporate a lot of linear elements which would match NB44’s brand identity and make the visual experience look expensive, simple and refined at the same time.

Another challenge we had to face here was coming up with layouts which would accommodate the long copy the clients provided us with without making the application look too text-heavy.

We are proud to say that we managed to take all of those challenges and turned them into opportunities. We ended up designing a simple, elegant and intuitive experience which feels like part of the NB44 brand.

Ongoing development process

NB44 was successfully handed over to our developers and is currently in its development phase. We are truly proud of the experience we designed and are impatiently waiting for the upcoming release of the application. The NB44 website, where the users can inquire about the membership, is currently live and can be viewed here.