L'Óreal - Sensorium

ux UI design interaction Experience l'oreal sensorium ILLUSTRATION

client L´Óreal

developed at YDreams (http://ydreamsglobal.com/)
Lisbon - Portugal (1st product) + worldwide rollout

Initially, L'Óreal's goal was to express their market leadership by bringing innovation to the perfumes industry. But soon we started to realize we could be creating something really unique in the world as far as point of sales experience was concerned. We took full advantage of L'Óreal's expertise, and together with psychologists, trendsetters and writers we came up with what we believed to be the best algorithm to understand peoples preferences in regards to their tastes, lifestyle and personality.

The concept

The concept was simple to understand but hard to execute: it was all about playing with the senses to create an experience. Every time we had to make a decision we would first come back to that statement. So how did it work? The user would come in front of the Sensorium in just a few straight forward they would be given 3 possible results (no big thinking involved - remember this is all about the senses). The corresponding perfumes on the shelves (man on the right and woman o the left) would then highlight matching the selections on the screen. In some initial testing, more than 90% of the enquired people said the results were accurate and that at least one of the suggestions matched they're personal preferences. That created trust which made them accept the other suggestions as valid options they would try.

How we did it
Since this was a sensorial experience we didn't want to use any of the common interaction standards like the touchscreen solution. So we came up with the idea of not using touch at all. We used ultrasonic sensors and people would just have to get their hand close to the sensor which represented their choice. Initially, we even thought of adding a light breeze to it but time constraints pushed that idea away. In the end, we still used the touch screen as a backfall solution if necessary, but we never activated it as people really got into the sensorial no-touch experience.

Interface design

The interface design for this project was a huge challenge due to two main reasons: no-touch interface and communication. But even the no-touch was pretty well tackled with a lot of trial and error and user testing. The communication part was… special. It was an amazingly fun playground as far as digital illustration is concerned but the concepts and ideas had to be crystal clear in order for the whole experience to work. And again, with the help of all the experts involved, we managed to deliver a memorable experience people found useful and with trustworthy results.