Weekly Critique: Fashion Brand — COS
Weekly Critique: Fashion Brand — COS
The popular brand J.Crew has filed for bankruptcy. The fashion industry was hit directly during the coronavirus situation during which it was necessary to self-isolate. How are fashion companies tackling this situation? Online sales grew rapidly, while athletic apparel retailers declined as stores closed amid the pandemic. Fashion companies are now focusing on online sales. Although I don’t do much shopping at the fashion brand COS, when I think of ‘COS’’, monotones, pastel tones, and minimalist designs are drawn right into my head. This is the reason why I chose COS, which has a clear brand image, as the theme of this Crits is to a website by using Jesse James Garret’s five elements of UX.
Here are what I found from COS’s website following Jess James Garrett’s five planes — strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface, and each plane is dependent on each other.
COS official website: https://www.cosstores.com
- The Strategy Plane - Productive Objectives and User Needs
“What do our users want to get out of it?”
The strategy plane is strongly connected with the brand’s mission and persona. What does a customer (user) want to get out of the fashion brand’s website? That’s obviously clothes and accessories. Maybe some customers want to check the prices before going to the store but most of them, especially during the pandemic, want to order clothes online at reasonable prices.
“COS aspires for longevity and its minimalist silhouettes, use of natural textiles, and restrained color palette have staying power — an antidote to fashion’s inherent ephemerality. To COS one of the links between fashion and architecture–aside from conceptual inspiration–is how people use and perceive the two: It’s about experience.”
From the interview with Gustafsson, The creative director of COS, I was able to learn COS expects its customers to experience a minimalist design and architectural inspiration through their products.
Reference. Budds, Diana. “The Secret To COS’s Inspired Minimalism” Fastcompany, 22 April 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3059138/the-secret-to-coss-inspired-minimalism
- The Scope Plane - Functional Specifications and Content Requirements
“What are we going to make?”
The website maintained a minimalist design, but the ‘Subscribe to Newsletter’ button was always visible from anywhere on the site. Online users can visit websites and make purchases at any time, even if they don’t necessarily shop right now, and maintaining a relationship with them is to increase public-friendliness with the brand. Thus, the brand’s website serves as a platform for continuous communication with customers or potential customers. That’s why the subscription button is always visible despite the minimalist website design, in order to secure subscribers who are constantly receiving the news.
- The Structure Plane — Interaction Design and Information Architecture
According to Jess James Garrett, the structure plane is about the arrangement of navigational elements allowing the users to browse categories of products. In addition to the context mentioned above, the navigation of the homepage is neat and clean. However, since pages are linked mainly from images to images, it takes several steps to find the desired product. A more intuitive connection would be better.
Also, it is called ‘There is more to explore’, but in the end, it leads to the same page or shows the same image, so it feels boring. It is a brand with an architectural concept, but when you scroll down the pages, the simple division into Women, Men, and Kids comes up all of sudden, and does not match the flow of the entire page.
- The Skeleton Plane - Interface Design, Navigation Design, and Information Design
In a wide margin, the buttons are mostly a neat text style. The products are stably contained in the shopping cart, and everything worked well, including the menu button when ordering.
When you search for ‘dress’ at the top of the website, a related search word automatically pops up to help you find the style you want. It was easy to see at a glance, and the search results were again viewed in several categories.
- The Surface Plane - Sensory Design / Visual images and text
The surface plane was the most interesting part of researching COS. Like the COS brand, all colors are black, white, and gray, and only orange and blue pastel shades are used for highlighting. Users can feel as if they are reading a single online magazine. In particular, the magazine section is the course’s stylebook, which makes the website image more COS-style.
From Garrett’s theory, what I learned is user experience is ultimately a journey of decision making. In other words, the designer’s decision in every little step in the process of developing a website makes customers decide to make a purchase decision.
