A Brand Realized
In September 2007, Artefact was invited to present a point-of-view presentation and supporting demo for an event sponsored by Microsoft called "Light up your brand." We chose to build a high-level design concept that would demonstrate what consumer web experiences might be like in the near future.
Nau is a new apparel brand offering chic, sporty, active clothes and a novel online/offline business model, along with a focus on community action. We love this brand. Because it has incredible lovemark potential, we approached Nau about creating a conceptual demo of the next version of their site for the near future. Nau helped us by providing us with clothing for our photo shoot, as well as some additional assets.
The company is innovative—shoppers can browse Nau’s brick-and-mortar store and receive a 10% discount (and free delivery) if they order goods at in-store web terminals. Nau's clothes are made from environmentally-friendly custom fabrics and non-toxic dyes, and everything in their brand experience has been carefully considered to minimize its environmental impact.
Generally, few brands manage to build software experiences that reflect the spirit of their brand promise. Our goal for this project was to explore ways to realize the brand promise of Nau in a software experience. Accordingly, we felt the design should be a kind of adventure. We created an experience that visually simulated outdoor environments, and built a navigation model that invited you to actively explore the experience.
We designed simple menu-based and search-based interactions to satisfy users who know exactly what they are looking for, but focused on making the main user interface more of an adventure—an exploration of different environments and categories. Using simple gestures pans the user interface left and right, and jumps through portals into other environments. We also explored some innovative comparison features. Later in the demo, we showed ways to "explore" the individual items of clothing and reveal additional information about the fabrics, dyes, manufacturing, and even feedback from satisfied customers.
The sense of movement through three-dimensional space combined with a sense of exploration creates a sense of mystery that encourages people to spend time within the experience. The experience was designed for the Web, and with the emergence of more sophisticated technologies, such as Silverlight, Flex, Deepzoom and Photosynth, we can see a near future in which this richer kind of web experience will be viable, working "live" from a real database backend rather than a static, custom-built experience (as in Flash). We are currently building a real proof of technology, so watch this space for a demo soon.