Burberry

Cross-platform product and experience design, from the design of burberry.com, where I made mobile e-commerce viable for selling luxury products, to tying garment development with emerging digital opportunities.

Throughout 2010 – 2017, my focus at Burberry took a holistic approach to the end-to-end customer experience. I developed and defined cutting edge mobile web experiences, bringing the collection to life online through rich, detailed, expressive imagery. I created new tooling for omnichannel in-store experiences, engaging and attracting new customers through innovative interactive advertising experiences, and finally worked with the garment designers to develop the trench and scarf to help the brand go beyond UI and UX optimisation constraints.

The digital commerce work between the iteration and testing had two distinct phases: making mobile web commerce a luxurious and viable conversion channel, and secondly, elevating imagery to show the brand and experience of what the clothes would make you feel like.

Back in 2012 the mobile web, while burgeoning, e-commerce wasn’t prolific and when it came to luxury e-commerce wasn’t considered possible. I designed and prototyped the use of native-like animations, and large beautiful imagery to create a luxurious digital commerce experience that transformed expectations of mobile commerce, both to internal stakeholders and the customers.

The website felt as rich as a native app leading to sales to grow and grow. The app was also architected in such a way that it meant it was used across all of Burberry’s digital tools (a proto-design system if you will).

The second phase of the e-commerce work came with the idea that the UX and UI of the site could be tweaked through testing, but it would never push the needle. The area of opportunity was e-commerce imagery. From our research, we knew that we could show more details and bring the brand and product to life through casting and moving away from non-recognisable model shots. The image refresh coincided with a light visual identity refresh, moving to a lighter and cleaner look to let the imagery stand out.

At Burberry, we explored novel ways to create “advertising as entertainment”. The festive season provided a great space for making things just fun for the customer: and I led on projects with Harrods in London and Printemps in Paris. Both allowed the viewer to control the scenes in the store windows with their bodies or phone connections.

The interactive scarf ad aimed to be fun; it was part of a more comprehensive re-launch of the classic cashmere scarf and allowed the customer to either buy it there and then or connect them to the Regent street store.

Shopping for trench coats online was hard - the UX and UI were ok, the research kept coming up with that people just wanted “the Burberry trench coat”, and finding that in a grid of around 200 versions was difficult. Working with the garment designers, I helped drive a user-centred approach to design the online experience that would match the garment, creating a more straightforward and more desirable proposition to the customer, three fits, three lengths, and three colours.

A similar approach was taken for the scarf. We explored the possibilities of near-infinite customisation but landed on a balance of allowing customers to personalise the product with their initials but still retain the provenance and prestige of a luxury item.

By aligning customer needs to the garment, we created new but heritage products with an online and in-store experience that met and exceeded expectations.