Lancôme: les femmes méritent le bonheur — websites UX evaluation
Bonjour every fellow male! Anxious every time before Valentines’ Day or anniversary? I hope not. But for those who are, we may have a savior — one of the top girls’ favorite — Lancôme.
As a French luxury perfumes and cosmetics house that distributes products internationally since 1935, Lancôme is looking to digitalize itself to connect the future business.
Lancôme Digital Flagship program, supported by firstborn, is aiming to reinvigorating a makeup powerhouse by relaunching Lancôme.com from a branding and e-Commerce perspective. Overall, the new version of the websites on both desktop and mobile devices are innovative, well-functional and easy to use.
In fact, Lancôme has few elements that will remind you of male identity. It is made for women, or you can say, Lancôme is just like a woman: radiant, captivating, touching and sublime at one and the same time. The brand’s aim is to offer every woman the possibility to sublimate her beauty and femininity, whatever her age and wherever she lives in the world, by giving her the best of science with major innovations that have marked their epoch.
Personally, as a male customer, I expect my experience with cosmetics products to be simple, straightforward and of the most importance — accurate.
Simplicity. You don’t want to mess up with the Valentines’ Day or anniversary gift. Lancôme makes it easy for me to search for “safe choice” when picking up the gift. Best seller — GÉNIFIQUE & La vie est belle are on the top of the home-page as recommendations. I want to save my time from looking at tons of information that I am not familiar with. Increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time (Hick’s Law). I’m glad Lancôme saves me the trouble.
Straightforwardness. The implementation of AR (Augmented Reality) technology — you can virtually try on your makeup for almost every product before make the decisions.
Accuracy. Moreover, e-Youth Finder is Lancôme’s best skincare routine for different skin needs in only two minutes. This first virtual skincare diagnostic tool is powered by Artificial Intelligence and backed by 85-years of skincare expertise. The algorithm is built on a database of over 10,000 clinically graded pictures to analyze key factors that contributes to personal skin’s youth and health. With one easy selfie (under detailed instructions of how to take a qualified one), e-Youth diagnoses your skin conditions and gives you advice accordingly. And don’t worry about privacy, it deletes your uploaded selfie once it finished your analysis. The result is its product bundle that you can refer to as a skincare plan for everyday morning and evening, or you can take it as a free education experience.
Let’s talk a little bit more about its aesthetics design.
“Marketing aesthetics” is a broad term. It refers to promoting the best experience, contributing to the brand organization or brand image. When we talk about a website as marketing material, aesthetics play an important role in influencing consumers’ perceptions and subsequent purchasing decisions.
A study by Stanford University also reports findings, which support aesthetics and how it affects the credibility of a website. In my experience with Lancôme websites, its color preference, content consistency and page-loading speed earns itself a lot of credit.
Color. The website’s background color is pure white, making room for delivering its essential materials and messages without too much distraction. Also, the adorable pinkish chat with us bubble make you feel welcome and comfortable. It certainly makes it look more trustworthy.
Content consistency. Lancôme uses no wrong set of fonts or pixelated images. And it maintains consistency in the placement of logos and their design among others. In addition to these, the pages are readable and easily navigable.
Page-loading speed. Personally, this is a factor I put weight on a lot than others. What is the point of having an aesthetically pleasing website, if your web pages take up forever to load? You will find nearly none video content or large images that are driven by flash or JavaScript on Lancôme’s website. Simply applying HTML language to create its content not only give a great UI but also speed up the loading time.
A tip for the website: Shiseido automatically pop-up options for language for customers while Lancôme doesn’t, yet Lancôme, like many websites, provides such choice on the top of its official page. I feel that Shiseido cares about its customers more from the first impression on the language choice pop-up.
Signing off
- Charles
