Beauty and the Beast

It’s time to get weird.

If we asked you to design the perfect purchase flow on the back of a napkin, you would probably—with varying levels of artistic dexterity—draw a landing page with a lifestyle photography hero, which then leads to a product listing page with facet filtering, which then leads to a product detail page with a clever description, stellar reviews, beautiful images and pricing, which then leads to a perfectly optimized one-page checkout flow.

This is the canon of e-commerce design. It’s perfect. And it’s the same. For every. Single. Brand.

When an industry is young, best practices are nonexistent, and variance is high. As the industry matures and develops a shared taste, best practices are established, and variance plummets. That’s how we got Baymard—or, as we lovingly call it, the Big Book of eCommerce No-Nos.

“So what?” you might ask. “More best practices mean fewer barriers to entry, and less variance means less friction for the consumer.”

That is true for the average brand and the average consumer. The easier you make it to shop with you, the more customers will do it.

And yet, certain brands don’t offer convenience. They don’t really care about refining their product discovery flow or optimizing their post-purchase emails or even—cover your eyes!—reducing the number of steps on their checkout. Instead, they provide quirkiness, exploration, and exclusivity. And customers absolutely love them.

Informally, we refer to these as experiential brands, in contrast with the more traditional transactional brands. With an experiential brand, you’re not spending money for a product—you’re spending money for cultural capital. The product itself doesn’t really matter. What matters is the experience of discovering the product, buying it, owning it, and benefitting from the social status this experience bestows upon you.

There is an interesting parallel here with the concept of finite and infinite games. Transactional brands are finite games: you’re playing to win a prize. Experiential brands, on the other hand, are infinite games: you’re playing for the joy of continuing to play.

As a result of this dynamic, experiential brands show some attractive traits, such as being able to transcend “value for money” considerations and command organic customer loyalty.

So, how does that connect to design? Well, experiential brands thrive on breaking the rules. The weirder their digital properties, the more valuable the experience of engaging with and buying from the brand. They throw away the best practices in favor of inside jokes, easter eggs, and kitsch visuals. They know how to do things right, and they intentionally go the other way to create a deeper connection with their customers.

Now, let’s be clear about something: it would be madness to suggest that all brands should be fully experiential. It’s complicated, unreliable, and not always desirable. In fact, most brands will fall somewhere across the transactional-experiential spectrum, with only a few pure-play outliers; think the whole dropshipping category on the transactional side, think brands like MSCHF on the experiential side.

What we do believe is that many brands that rely on a primarily transactional approach, and only design with the average consumer in mind, are missing out on the opportunity to capitalize on weirdness. And in a saturated market, weirdness is one more weapon you can use to stand out from the crowd, attract new customers, and create a community of raving fans.

So, as much as we love our Baymard subscription, here’s our plea. The next time you’re sitting down with your design team to work on something, pause for a second and ask yourself, “Shall we get weird?”