Luxottica, known for its product design, has just updated its website to reflect online design trends – and give its products a stylish showcase.
Luxottica’s site last week – showing the home page and the brand page.
The site served the purpose of communicating company performance but did little to inspire interest in design or products. Given that they design eye-wear for some of the world’s great fashion brands it was a disappointing experience.
Luxottica’s site now – showing the home page and the brand page.
The difference is huge; Luxottica has re-used a lot of existing content to create a rich experience for the user packed with images and video. The navigation is simplified, brands are highlighted, and the company’s charitable foundation “OneSight” is featured.
But the changes go deeper than just visual, they include;
- responsive design, meaning this site will look good on all devices
- shareable content, every page includes the “share” option under an icon
- pulling in content from social media channels
- icons used to identify functions across the site
- “infinite” scroll, combined with persistent left hand navigation
- increased storytelling, instead of writing text about the company or the brand stories have been collated from across the company to give the visitor a understanding of the whole company.
This website design is on trend, covering a number of the 7 digital design trends I wrote about last year.
There are a few “minus points”; the media gallery includes just 5 images which seems very thin when the rest of the site is so rich, the videos are sometimes very long, and the content in the individual brand pages is rather uneven (very rich for Oliver People and very thin for Chanel) which I understand is due to some brands being owned while others are licencing agreements.
But the framework is there to deliver great visual content, and tell the brand story to all stakeholders. The team behind the site should be congratulated, it’s a great step in the right direction – Luxottica.com now looks like it’s from a design company.
(Disclaimer; I know the project manager behind this, she’s fantastic – she also used to work for me)
Change Meme 