We just recently posted an article on Practical eCommerce about feeds and data streams. In an interview with Ken Fry, we uncovered some of the key qualities that make feeds valuable for small business owners as well as look at the evolution of future feed like functionality.
Getting back to e-commerce, for it to be successful, it really needs to be specific to those kinds of social goals that’s a part of being in e-commerce. It may not be interaction between people in a very direct way like Facebook or Twitter does it, but maybe interactions in an abstract way such as with a product. I can imagine information about consumer products the same way a sales person might provide that information.
I was asked to provide a professional opinion about the design of Paula’s Choice website. Not having a command of cosmetics, makeup and skin care, I asked my cosmetics aware colleagues, Jennifer and Sabrina to talk with me about makeup.
We reviewed a number of makeup sites including Paula’s Choice, CoverGirl, Max Factor, Revlon, Clinique, MAC, ProActiv, Aveda, Perricone MD, and SkinCeuticals.
PAULA’S CHOICE
The value proposition of Paula’s Choice was unclear to us. Who’s Paula? Why would anybody care? Why do we want to buy these products? These answers were not obvious to us. It took a fair amount of reading ‘About Paula’ for Sabrina to remember this woman. “Oh, yeah she wrote a book.” It also took awhile for us to read that she’s “The Cosmetics Cop”. If the value proposition is her opinion and choice then that needs to be emphasized much more in the site. We thought that Perricone MD and his melons (www.perriconemd.com) did a better job communicating his command of medicine as the value proposition.
Many of the other cosmetic sites do a good job getting their value prop across in the design of their site. For example, MAC’s value prop is about color and artistry. Check out their site, www.maccosmetics.com and the value is obvious.
MAC Recommendation 1
The value proposition and brand qualities of Paula’s Choice needs to better present Paula as the authoritative cosmetics cop. Make Paula relatable to the target audience. Make her someone whose voice and choice is respected. It will be in brand values that Paula’s Choice can be differentiated in a meaningful way. Designing the site around reviews, comparisons and ratings is perfectly align with this brand.
Observation:
Paula’s Choice is designed to browse and search products. It’s designed as a very functional, marketing and sterile site. There was nothing that moved our emotions. Where’s the no wrinkles girl? Where’s the air-brushed girl that looks amazingly beautiful? Is there anything that’s going to appeal to my vanity? We couldn’t find it.
MAC moved our emotions. The photography was artistic and tasted like honey. The artistic nature of the photography aligns perfectly with the values of the brand.
Recommendation 2
Paula’s site could benefit by providing some aspirational content that moves the soul, for example brand appropriate high resolution photography at the right scale.
Observation:
We weren’t really sure where to go on Paula’s site once we landed on the home page. Granted we didn’t have any particular goal to shop or buy makeup, but there also wasn’t any one thing that caught our attention. The site uses a common navigation bar with drop down menus. There are standard drop down controls for selecting items that will help find the best product for our skin. We could imagine the results being a catalog of pages showing rows and columns of products, just like many shopping websites. Not too engaging but very efficient and familiar.
I personally enjoyed the Max Factor site the most. It’s the makeup of makeup artists. They had high resolution photos of women wearing makeup. Imagine that? I thought it was slick that I could click on the photo and learn what product was used by the pretty model. Not only was it useful, it was fun to explore the images to see what makeup was used to make these pretty girls, pretty.
MAX FACTOR
Recommendation 3
Provide engaging and fun features that easily encourage exploration. Paula’s site could benefit by enabling people to explore options, reviews and see which products might be best and why.
To wrap this blog up, Paula’s site could be improved by doing the following
apply a good foundation of brand values to cover the entire site.
accent the eyes and lips to move the soul.
highlight the best features to lure engagement.
If you can inspire a guy like myself to browse makeup online and blog about it then you’ll have beautiful results.
For those of you who have been following our next generation retail project, here’s an exciting update! After completing our research that helped us identify insights and painpoints with current retail experiences, we developed a solution that illustrates what the future holds for retailers who are attempting to bridge the gap between ecommerce and in-store purchases and why retailers can find significant ROI by implementing a different approach to in-store purchases.
Introducing: The Wall
The Wall is an interactive life-sized display that brings online capabilities into the store and onto products. Customers can place physical products against The Wall display and interact with related content aggregated from multiple online sources such as product info, related info, opinions, analytics, demonstrations and media.
The Wall allows consumers to:
find products available in-store and online
match them with other products
bring in opinions of friends, community and experts to bear on their decision
find collections of products to match a price range
interact with the display with their mobile phone
engage in the sport and culture – in the store
The Wall allows retailers to:
increase user loyalty and stickiness between online and offline channels
offer a unique shopping experience
give their sales force a boost
increase up-sell and cross-sell of merchandise
effectively leverage the inevitable force of social media in shopping
offer more than their physical inventory in the store
If you haven’t already been checkin’ up on us, then you might have missed a couple of updates on how things are doing with our internal project focusing on retail shopping experiences. We’ve wrapped up our research and concepting and are now making plans to take it a step further. Maybe a prototype? Maybe just a movie? We’ll keep you post. Until then, you can read up on our last few entries. If you have any comments or feedback, let us know. There’s been a lot of lessons learned from the project and we’re anxious to hear your thoughts too.
We just updated the Labs blog with an entry on John Logic, one of our participants for our snowboard commerce study. We’ve captured a lot of great quotes and insights from our 60 minutes him. Jump over to watch the video and the observations we made.
We’re rolling up our sleeves at the moment getting ready to dive into some Frontier work. You might be familiar with our previous experiment in touch based interfaces, so we’re happy to invite you to be a part of this new project focusing on the snowboard shopping scene. This is going to be an ongoing thing for the next couple of months where we will be updating the Labs site with information as soon as we get it.
by Kevin Wong, posted August 11th, 2009
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