The user experience of a designer clothing online store
House of Fraser, the UK designer clothing retailer, has recently launched their first e-commerce site.
Paul Rouke has posted a long user experience review “looking at how persuasion architecture has been adopted, key browsing functionality provided and the overall shopping experience you can expect at this new luxury online store”. He calls it a “user experience triumph“.
Putting brands at what appears to be the forefront of their online strategy, the new House of Fraser website provides an almost immediate synergy between their online experience and the aspirations of the brand hungry visitor. On first view the site provides all the features and functionality you would expect from a site which has been developed using what I expect would have been a user centered design approach – high visibility of the search functionality and shopping basket (inc. summary of key info, a useful mini basket dropdown feature and the login/register links), clearly labeled and intuitive category navigation, a clear, best practice modeled checkout process and a strong focus on persuasion architecture.
He concludes:
Irrespective of the possible user experience improvements that could be introduced, House of Fraser have produced an excellent e-commerce website which perfectly suits its target audience and compliments its high street presence. With a degree of richer user experience functionality introduced, and a clear focus on branding and imagery, whilst adopting very much a user centered design approach and significant persuasion architecture techniques, House of Fraser’s first transactional web presence is destined to be a great success and very much a destination website for style and brand driven online shoppers.
