Delighting customers with an AR Mirror experience

Augmented Reality retail experience

Work Augmented Reality retail experience

At a glance

In March 2019, we were commissioned to develop a new, memorable AR Magic Mirror interface for one of the most famous department stores in the world, Harrods.

Harrods engaged Full Clarity to create an interactive ‘Magic Mirror’ experience for the beauty halls as part of a major in-store revamp to the iconic Knightsbridge store. The mirrors, using Augmented Reality technology would provide customers for all over the world with an interactive and playful experience that enables them to virtually try on different make-up styles, categories and brands.

Project type

Innovation

Sector

Luxury retail

Services provided

Project length

5 months

The challenge

As is often the case with emerging technology, there were many challenges to overcome including:

Architecting multi-level makeup navigation

There were four levels of navigation to incorporate; Category > Sub-category > Product > SKU. No other existing AR mirror or mobile app had this level of depth.

Ensuring intuitive UX for all cultures

Due to the international nature of the customers, the experience needed to be intuitive enough to work for people from all cultural backgrounds.

Providing a 'wow' factor for customers

Harrods wanted a best-in-class AR experience with a “wow” factor that left their customers with a sense of enjoyment and delight from their visit to the iconic store.

Balancing stakeholders from in-store & online

Working with a vast range of stakeholders across the beauty, in-store and digital teams all with varying goals for this innovative project.

Designing product for physical environment

Re-creating the actual conditions of a busy Knightsbridge store to be able to design, test, refine the experience was a challenge to realistically replicate.

Creating AR interface on a reflective mirror

The interface had to be accessible against all skin tones, all clothing colours, all lighting conditions (day/night), and against all objects in the mirror background.

Key stakeholders

The business was represented by a range of stakeholders from the retail store environment, beauty department, and others involved in the digital team, so it was important to understand their individual goals for the project.

Carli Glines

Product manager, merchandising

Carli was tasked with delivering a best-in-class customer experience for a magic AR makeup mirror makeup leaving users with a “wow” factor.

Mia Collins

Beauty manager, merchandising

Mia wanted customers to light up, for the mirror to be a real celebration of what beauty is all about: having fun and adding a bit of joy into their lives.

Mark Arnold

Head of digital design

Mark oversees all the digital design output for Harrods and wanted to ensure the UX/UI work met the exceptional Harrods standards.

Stephanie Houle

Senior business analyst

Stephanie provided strategic insights and data-driven recommendations to assist with business processes and goals for the project.

Our Approach

An overview of the process we undertook:

Research

Define

Design

Validate

Research

User Interviews, Ethnographic & Contextual Studies, stakeholder workshops.

Define

Offline to online customer journey mapping, and defining user flows for customer personas.

Design

Rapid sketching of concepts, paper prototyping, concept mockups and full UX/UI designs.

Validate

Hardware, ergonomic and user testing and making refinements with engineering.

Research & Define

With our brief to make this second to none in terms of a Mirror AR experience for customers, our process involved extensive research to ensure we understood the people, environment and technology parameters, all of which informed and validated our design decisions.

Customer research

Technology research

Personas

User flows

Journey maps

It was critical to understand who the users of the Beauty Halls were and the wider context, environment, and journey the customers were taking.

We conducted in-depth user interviews speaking directly with real customers in the Beauty Halls. We also did Ethnographic & Contextual Studies to understand and observe the environment the customers were operating in. Our research was based on spending time with real users in their environment and understanding their experience, emotions and motivations. Off the back of this work we were well informed to be able to create our personas and customer journey maps.

We also needed to understand the hardware and technologies we would be working with. So we travelled to meet the company producing the mirror hardware and software to see and interact with the physical mirror prototype.

Some of the considerations we identified through this were the responsiveness of the touchscreen, the quality of the camera being used and the light being generated from the screen. We were able to take away an early prototype of the mirror hardware which enabled us to mock up our designs and place in situation.

Next, we began the process of distilling our research, teasing out common themes, challenges and opportunities. We created detailed personas, user flows and customer journey maps to identify the touchpoints where we could remove friction and find opportunities to add moments of delight. This process created a firm foundation to inform our wireframes and UI design.

Full Clarity conducted extensive interviews, user research and onsite visits to the store, to ensure accurate and comprehensive user journeys.

Carli Glines Product manager, merchandising

Design & Validate

Taking all our distilled research from the research and define phases, we were then very well informed in terms of what we needed to design in order to create an oustanding user experience for the AR touchscreen mirror.

Concept sketching

Paper prototyping

Wireframing

UX/UI Product design

We began with sketches, paper prototypes and wireframes – constantly referring back to the insights uncovered during our research process. It was an iterative process which included regular validation through presentations to stakeholders and users. Once there was consensus that the designs would be both technically feasible and bring the desired sense of ‘magic’ to the project, we moved on to UI design.

Sketching paper prototype, Rapid prototyping

The results

Following a very thorough discovery phase including user interviews, user research and in-store visits, we created personas and customer journey maps, plotting the different personas’ experience across the different touchpoints. Alongside our AR, technology, hardware and ergonomic research, this process gave us a rich understanding of the opportunities to create a magical experience for Harrods’ customers.

We are extremely proud of the final product designs, which can now be experienced within the beauty hall at Harrods.

Harrods wrote Full Clarity a glowing five star review on Clutch

The Magic Mirror was featured in the Telegraph and Tatler magazine

Harrods engaged Full Clarity for three additional Statements of Work

Full Clarity provided a best-in-class customer experience for an Augmented Reality makeup mirror delighting in-store customers from a variety of cultural backgrounds. They conducted user research, interviews and onsite store visits with meticulous attention to detail during the process. Their high-quality end designs reflected the team’s willingness to provide a really top-notch service to Harrods.