Alternate Microinteractions: Day 2 — Fashion Browsing

Today, I want to focus on the experience of viewing high fashion on a mobile device. Almost all of the responsive websites or native apps that are currently on the market to serve high-end fashion products maintain a conventional layout to display products: Grid View.

While grid view is efficient for scanning items in a collection, users have to rely mostly on the thumbnail images to make their selection, given text is shortened to prevent too much textwrapping.

In the case of high fashion, retailers have to rely on exquisite photography to replicate the essence of their pieces. The grid approach is a major constraint to the fashion designer trying to show more than a piece of their collection through an image. They want the user to see their collection as a story, and they want the user to focus on each piece individually.

What if viewing high fashion online was a more focused experience and had a bolder narrative?

In this alternative experience, the user experiences a designer’s collection as if they were in the front row of the fashion runway. The recent technological progress in the fashion industry which has democratized high fashion and made virtual access to runway shows available to the public is being utilized as the forefront of this experience. Users ultimately get a greater feel of the piece, and it places higher importance on each individual item rather than the collection as a whole.