Express
Reimagining the Online Shopping Experience
Year
Early 2014
Discipline
Art Direction, Product Design, Concept Design
Industry
Retail, Fashion & Apparel, E-commerce
Overview
In early 2014, I did freelance concept work for Express's ecommerce site. A UX director I knew there brought me in to help push the existing design team to think differently about the shopping experience, not to extend the site's existing look and feel, but to let the product imagery carry the story. The site at the time used flat, category based browsing that hadn't been optimized for mobile. This was a concept exploration, not a tested or shipped redesign, meant to show the internal team a different way of approaching the problem.
My Role
I was Art Director on this, designing screens myself and working with Express's existing imagery to concept a new way to shop: by look instead of by category, letting shoppers browse assembled, stylist created outfits rather than isolated product grids.
Problem
Express's existing site used flat, category based browsing. It looked fine but didn't use the full screen and wasn't optimized for mobile. The experience wasn't set up to sell a look or tell a story, just individual products sorted into categories.
Solution
The concept started with a single entry point split by men's and women's, and everything a shopper saw after that catered to that audience. Within a category like pants, a hero image and supporting imagery would show a pair of pants worn as part of a full outfit, so shoppers could cross-sell into a "shop the look" moment instead of only seeing an isolated product. Shopping was organized by look, style, occasion, and season rather than flat categories, and the whole thing was optimized for mobile given how poorly the existing site handled it. This covered the product shopping experience through add to cart. It was never tested with real users; it was a concept meant to demonstrate a different way of thinking to Express's internal design team.
Outcome
While this specific concept was never shipped as-is, it set the stage for what Express's shopping experience looks like today. The site has evolved since, but the core idea, filling the screen and leading with imagery instead of over-stylizing the interface, has stuck.
What I'm Proud Of
The design still holds up years later. It let the imagery do the heavy lifting instead of chasing trends, because that's the clothes' job, not the interface's. It's timeless in a way a lot of ecommerce design from that era isn't.
