Designing With Ambiguity, Part I: Establishing An Experience And Design Principles

Anyone who has been paying attention to SSENSE in recent years has witnessed its trajectory into the spotlight of luxury retail during an era of digital maturation. With an expansion in product and designer offerings and an increase in exclusive capsule collections and collaborations, SSENSE has grown its assortment to 40,000 items and 500 brands for menswear and womenswear; becoming top of mind for customers who shop designer fashion.

Some noteworthy technology achievements over the last few years include:

1. A cosmetic redesign in 2017, largely evident on the homepage of the dot-com.
2. The 2018 opening of the David Chipperfield-designed SSENSE MONTRÉAL flagship in Old Montreal that houses a massive inventory-only Vertical Lift Module — a shelving and picking system usually used in warehouses — and an internal app built entirely in-house that helps SSENSE Stylists facilitate private shopping appointments.
3. The advent of SSENSE microsites to offer visually stimulating ways to read and shop.
4. Now, the launch of the first public-facing SSENSE app which offers a hyper-personalized way to shop.

With these previous achievements in mind, there was an undeniable pressure to ensure that the next big thing at SSENSE would be nothing less than its predecessors. With that, the SSENSE mobile app initiative started as a small innovation team seeking to understand and define the project, rallying stakeholders, countering skeptics, and eventually gaining enough internal momentum to be fully realized. Read more about how customer insights and workshops were leveraged to define the product vision in this previous SSENSE TECH article.

From the beginning, the team established that the SSENSE app was going to be more than a recreation of the mobile web experience with obvious additions (ie. Apple Pay, push notifications, etc). Our mandate: create a digitally transformative mobile platform that empowers customers to shop a vast inventory and pave the way for future e-commerce strategies, such as app-exclusives or localized offerings. We tried to find an innovation sweet spot of mobile-relevant enhancements that leveraged current resources and capabilities to bring an MVP to market.

From the product design perspective, this article will address the broad, daunting question that I struggle to answer during coffee breaks and brief encounters, “what was the whole process like?” or “how did you end up deciding on X and not Y?” The truth is, the process wasn’t linear or perfect. In creating something from what was essentially a blank canvas, we were often paralyzed by uncertainty in the face of opportunity. How did we approach designing the SSENSE app when faced with ambiguity?

Naming the Ambiguity

Like most big initiatives at a company, the ride wasn’t all smooth sailing. With varying switchbacks and false starts along the way, we were gripped by every creative’s nightmare of diverging without enough converging. One might wonder what challenges exist when designing a shopping app, especially when it can inherit from an existing platform. Seems pretty straightforward, right?

And in some ways, it was. But more often, the solution was never that simple. At SSENSE, the design challenges we faced were unique to our positioning within both fashion and technology industries. With rapid growth, there was a need to streamline internal efficiencies by utilizing better tools and technologies to meet the growing demands of e-commerce. When designing the app, we faced uncertainties from these angles:

1. Evolving the way customers interact with and perceive SSENSE. When initially thinking about ideas for the app, we indulged in remarks like, “is that on brand?” or “that feels off” and other vague commentary to shut down or revive ideas based on shared instinct. As designers, we often find ourselves teetering between sheer delight and feeling utterly abashed, as brilliant ideas turn into silly ones. Disruptive ideas become impractical. Radical turns novel. Sustainable, but boring. With a new platform and the possibilities of new technologies, we asked ourselves: how is the app staying true to the SSENSE brand, while working toward a future of mobility, immediacy, convenience, and speed?
2. Prioritizing features for the future. With acknowledgment and understanding of customer pain points and a backlog of parked ideas, which set of problems could be best addressed through the app? Considering the climate of growing global competition, ever-changing trends, and emerging technologies, how would the app pave the way for future enhancements for the SSENSE platform? As the mobile project gained momentum internally, several features or enhancements that were parked-for-later suddenly had shortened timelines.
3. Applying a new design system to our e-commerce. Most people overlook the fact that the redesign of 2017 had been rolled out everywhere except the e-commerce section of the SSENSE website. The onset of the app required us to revisit how we evolve the current design system to respect tactility and interaction. Up until this point, it was better fitted for consuming things like editorial or marketing collateral. It also needed to accommodate the complexities of mobile user interfaces and respect customer behaviour.

Redesigned home page (2017)

Current product details page (2019)

Outwardly, these discussions with stakeholders and customers (in the format of workshops, design sprints, interviews, and 1-on-1s) are not evident in the app now. When every nail needs a hammer, and every insight looks like an opportunity, this is how we found focus when designing with ambiguity:

1. Establish a core competency, or key experience to deliver.
2. Create principles for design decisions.
3. Prototype often (think by doing). Stay tuned for Part II of the article next week.

Establishing a Core Competency to Deliver

A core competency is the driving engine, or mechanic, that lays the foundations for a product to grow. It answers the simple question, “what does it do?”, and serves as the fulcrum for the design experience. The core competency for the SSENSE app was incubated within the domain of data algorithms, an area with great potential and not fully harnessed in any one channel. In defining what that core “thing” was, we looked at these value propositions:

Customer needs: How might we allow customers to discover and shop for items in our ever-increasing inventory with ease?

Business objectives: With our vast catalogue, how do we ensure that all of our products are being seen by the right people? A.K.A. increasing conversion on the mobile channel.

In this context, we concluded that the app’s core competency was its data-driven recommendation engine’s ability to drive fully personalized product recommendations, which would allow customers to discover and engage with relevant products faster.

This idea of a data-driven interface for our product catalogue became one of the ultimate, defining characteristics of the SSENSE app. Not only would it reduce friction points on our mobile channel, it would also tackle the challenge of personalization that is becoming increasingly relevant in the world of fashion e-commerce. While ‘personalization’ is not a new concept, SSENSE is in the business of taking what is familiar and serving it in new formats. We took the fundamental idea of a data-driven inventory to inspire and define design principles related to function (UX) and form (UI).

Creating Principles For Design

If you think about the core competency as a mechanic, or skeleton, the next step is to develop the meat of the app. When thinking about key experience principles to design for a single product vision, we described them as:

1. Hyper-personalization: offer engaging recommendations in relevant contexts.
2. Endless discovery: allow opportunities for continual browsing, no dead ends.
3. Seamless efficiency: offer easy ways to navigate through, or dive in/out of the catalogue.

These experience principles helped generate ideas and guide decisions related to user experience, while another set of principles were created for the visual form, or user interface.

While we did inherit most of the visual design language from the homepage of the dot-com, we had to tackle a new set of design guidelines to serve function and utility. The app’s design system was eventually established by these three design principles: reductionist, dense, and systematic.

Reductionist

Rather than play into the all-too-familiar minimal aesthetic, we reduced UI elements to its utmost practical, primitive form. The notion of “brutal utility” manifested in quick, no-frill transitions, and rigid animations. We removed the ambiguity of iconography and opted for text instead, creating a tone that is very plain and factual. We omitted the serif typeface — seen in editorial and marketing — and fixed on a single typeface to simplify the UI, while streamlining the design process by eliminating unnecessary complexity.

Dense

Early on, we entertained the idea of completely allowing the function of the app to inform the ‘form’, or layout of the UI. The visually dense aesthetic that we adopted aimed to convey a curated slice of products within our vast catalogue. We established parallels to consumer behaviour in an era of technology (normalized multi-tasking, over-stimulation, immediacy, and speed) by creating a tight grid system where products sit flush together. Rows and columns could multiply to change the layout of products. We maximized white space where product recommendations could exist, and unapologetically dialled up data-driven aspects and fervent shopping in the app’s aesthetic.

Systematic

We’re constantly working towards automating processes and maintaining as much operational efficiency as possible. For instance, our models are easily recognizable for customers due to the diligent standardization of our e-commerce imagery. We created recognizable patterns for our shop, and wanted to integrate this approach while designing the SSENSE app. By removing levers of manual operation and allowing the app to run its own recommendations and learn about customers autonomously, we created a coherent system for product organization.

In Summary

This wraps up the first of a two-part series exploring how we designed the SSENSE app. In the face of ambiguity, we stopped using our gut to make decisions — dispelling disputes related to being “on brand” — by defining principles to capture the essence of what we were doing, while aligning on a collective vision.

Stay tuned for Part II, which addresses how UX and product designers should stop ‘design thinking’ — getting bogged down by process, strategy, and documentation — and start the actual ‘doing’ in the face of ambiguity.

Editorial reviews by Max Kaplun, Deanna Chow, Liela Touré & Prateek Sanyal.

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