An exploration of the Modista.com User Interface

An exploration of the Modista.com User Interface

Posted by legacye in Home on 04 17th, 2009 | no responses

Modista are one of my company’s main competitors in the Search by Similarity domain and have a really interesting user interface -it’s fast, it’s sleek and for some things it works pretty well. At Pixsta we started off a few years ago with a UI a little like theirs – we focused on providing a unique discovery experience in online shopping through an “image cloud” which for a while worked for particular applications. One of the problems with discovery shopping is that customers may not be used to an unfamiliar interface and can struggle to adapt if they can’t figure it out in the first few minutes. Whilst we’ve gone down the route of developing a full blown search site AJ Shankar recently opened up about why Modista opted for their full-browser product grid.

One of our goals with Modista is to bring a bit of the real-life mall shopping experience to the web. When you go to a mall to buy a pair of shoes, you’re more likely to come out with one than if you visited an online retailer, even though the online shop has a much, much larger selection, often at lower prices to boot. Why?

We think a major component of the answer is the ease of exploration. It’s trivial to walk around a shoe store and notice something that strikes your fancy.

(Some other components — like the ability to try on a shoe for size or feel its texture — are tricky, and we leave it up to our retailer partners to approximate solutions to them, such as fast, free shipping, and a liberal return policy. Others, such as the desire to justify the time investment of going to the mall with a purchase, are even further out there.)

To read the rest of the interview, see here