Reinventing the Italian digital bookstore’s user experience.
Reinventing the Italian digital bookstore’s user experience.
Retail & E-commerce
2014
Mondadori
InMondadori (now Mondadori Store) is one of the biggest Italian media stores that sells books, movies, and music online.
To compete in an increasingly competitive market, and after a massive re-branding process, the goal was simple: reinventing the user experience of buying books online and boosting sales.
We designed a new service that radically changes the online book-buying experience: the online user feels as if they were doing it in the store, regardless of the device they use, thus experiencing something close to actually being among the shelves.
We conducted a field study to observe how people discover and choose books, how they evaluate them, and how they interact and explore the surrounding physical space to find a new one to read.
One of the most interesting insights that we developed concerns the sensorial relation between person and artefact, especially if the latter has a cover, which proves to be essential in the decision making, an aspect that is often overlooked when buying online.
In a historical moment where the books were just titles lists on websites, we imagined a user interface that’s like a big bookstore where the user can dive into rows of shelves, simulating the actual perception of the physical object.
Imagine an invisible interface that enhances the products on any type of desktop, tablet, or mobile device, making the experience of discovering and buying ubiquitous. This is what the new inMondadori is all about.
The user interface, minimalistic all the way through, is designed directly by the shape of the product and disappears or is minimized to its strictly necessary elements, allowing the user to fully experience the act of purchasing.
Product treatment was optimized to visualize the physical object in the best possible way, giving the user the feeling of beholding the actual thing.
Following integration in the Kobo Reader, the project is expected to stretch out towards the mobile realm and add on to the in-store purchase, consolidating the experience offered to customers.
InMondadori has continued to monitor its customers’ user experience, aiming to achieve further integration in various contexts.
Thanks to the new UX design, the online transition from the previous site (Bol.it) to InMondadori was a success, showing an increase in consumer adoption and loyalty.
Later the brand and the website further evolved in “Mondadori Store” which currently is one of the biggest Italian media-stores online.
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