How to navigate fashion with style
Since the beginning of the internet, online shopping has relied on endless lists and basic filters. What if we could make discovering fashion feel more natural again?
Guided by style, not categories.
Visual search for fashion
Together with my partner I started Lookfinder - a visual search plattform for shopping fashion. I was responsible for the end-to-end design process including concept development, branding and the full product Design. I also developed the entire frontend prototype using React.
Let me explain
Imagine you are looking for new clothes
And you have a vague style idea in your mind
What do you do?
Similar Clothes
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Most stores suggest clothes similar to what you’ve clicked on. The issue? You first have to find something good. And after a few clicks, you might end up trapped in a stylistic dead end, where everything looks the same.
Site AI bot
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AI bots can suggest clothes based on descriptions, but they depend on precise input. If you’re unsure how to describe your style, refining the results can quickly become frustrating.
Praying for Ads
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Social media ads often suggest clothing that matches personal taste and surface hard-to-find pieces. But the selection is unpredictable, and there’s no control over what appears.
Scroll endlessly
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This method ensures nothing gets overlooked, but at the cost of efficiency. Browsing through endless pages of products takes time and effort, often without a clear way to refine choices effectively.
The Search Bar
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Search functions can be unpredictable. Do they only look at product titles? Do they consider descriptions? Can they recognize details in images? Most of the time, it’s unclear.
Categories
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The most abundant form of filtering gives you a subset of clothes, but you still end up with thousands of unsorted products. Also, if you're looking for a style, you might not care whether it's the perfect jeans or the perfect jacket.
What does the data say?
69%
80%
69% of online shoppers go straight to the search bar when visiting ecommerce sites, but 80% leave due to a poor experience
Shoppers browsing fashion visuals online often experience choice overload, making it harder to commit to a purchase
The Solution
Let us propose
a new approach
What if we could simply express our taste and instantly get a selection that matches our style?
Tell me what you want without telling me what you want
The biggest challenge was finding the simplest way for users to communicate their style preferences without relying on words.
Let’s start by looking at how we naturally do this in real life when talking to a fashion-savvy friend.
In reality it can be very simple
You show your friend a few outfits you like.
They recommend you clothes of similar style.
Now lets translate this process into a digital application.
Instead of asking the user to show outifts they like, we could offer a selection they could match the outfits they like most. Preferably every time they select one we can refine the style step by step
You show your friend a few outfits you like.
We create a
taste profile
Turns out newer Visual Language AIs are amazing at categorizing outfits by detailed style.
They recommend you clothes of similar style.
Let’s match the best-
matching kind of matching
This first matching step should get the most attention, as it is crucial for weather or not the user is able to get results they expect.
There are different levels of detail for matching UX. These have different advantages and disadvantages. Lets find the one that fits our usecase best.
single option
focus on the
details
two options
focus on the
comparison
four options
focus on the
mood
5+ options
focus on the
variety
4 – todays magic number
Best because you can still see the oufits, but not too much so you dont focus on the details, but enough to get a clear sense of style in them. This layout makes people to not focus on the details and build a quick style profile. It also reduces the idea that they are going to see exactly what is in the images.
Lets put it all together
Select your favourite outfit
Describe your style
Urban Edge Fusion
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Matching Grid
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Options
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Style "Bucket"
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Main Userflow
Lets keep it simple.
We only need a screen to match clothes and one to discover all matches.
Landing
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Every step of the way we showed screens and working prototypes to potential users considering their tech understanding and background. From the start we recieved amazing feedback about the idea and the implementation.
"It feels like Tinder"