Design Explorations: Using Design to Address Business Objectives

My exploration looks at two commercial websites that use interactivity to solve or address business objectives.

The Chipotle website, http://www.chipotle.com/, is one of the more fun and effective commerical websites using Flash that I have found. It is a virtual playground of animation and interactivity, all aimed at building the brand of Chipotle as fresh, healthy, hip, socially conscious and slightly off-the-wall. The design effectively differentiates Chipotle from a dozen other "fast food" restaurants by contradicting the classic societal stereotype of fast food chains as fattening, unhealthy, "corporate", cookie-cutter, old-school business franchises with few, if any socially redeeming qualities.

On the Food-Menu page, we find an incredibly "clean" presentation of the restaurant's food with a flash photo player on a white background, creating an attractive and healthy-looking "clean-room" effect. Likewise, the Food-Ingredients page allows you to view (and desire) the clean, fresh-looking ingredients, attractively laid out for your perusal.

The FWI section -- Food With Integrity -- uses flash elements to tell a story and create the "non-corporate", customer-caring, do-gooder brand that Chipotle is building to differentiate itself from mass-market fast-food franchises. The design is again "clean" (white), with amusing, light-hearted animations (i.e., pounding in the CEO) and peaceful, wholesome, outdoorsy sounds to highlight the naturally raised animal products used in the ingredients.

Finally, I note the site design invites customers to become part of the hip, fun Chipotle culture, with a "Play" area and Chipotle-related downloads. Go to the customer-uploaded photos at www.chipotle.com/#/flash/play_photos and check out Photo 11 out of 163. Now, try to tell me that this picture doesn't make you want to be part of the "Chipotle nation."

Another very effective interactive website is the Chicos website at http://www.chicos.com/ (which appears to use Java Server Pages rather than Flash for its interactivity). The design of this website seeks to solve, or at least mitigate, one of the principle obstacles to online clothes shopping -- the lack of tactile feedback in the shopping process. When you shop for clothes in a retail store, you touch them very deliberately to gather more information about the item.

While you can't touch clothes online, the Chicos website provides a very effective alternative. Visit the "Jackets" page, for example, where you will find a typical "catalog-style" presentation of available jackets. Click on one of the models for a "Quick View" of one of the jackets. Now, on that jacket page, mouse over the picture of the model wearing the jacket. You are now presented with a zoom "window" of that jacket that gets you so close to the fabric fibers that it gives you a very effective "tactile substitute" for touching the jacket. Very clever!