Making that shopping experience more enjoyable: experience designers and visual merchandisers have a complete understanding of the interplay between retail processes, technologies, and techniques. They actively use these elements to create a complete retail experience for consumers that is both delightful and profitable.

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When a retail store first opens, you need to pull customers in and motivate them to buy. That attraction takes more than good products; it takes an "experience". Retail is truly a multi-disciplinary discipline. It encompasses various knowledge domains from architecture, design, spatial design to branding, merchandising, management, and retail.

Most of these domains are studied exclusively, but it is becoming necessary that there is a generalised knowledge of all these domains and a specialised field for coherently bringing them together for the effective retail experience.

This is the domain of the retail experience designer and visual merchandiser. These talented individuals work in the retail industry creating the "feel" or essence and aura of a store. Experience designers go beyond the look of a place, creating a unique experience in which shoppers can immerse themselves.

From swanky upmarket boutiques to the trendy window dressing and displays at leading stores on Orchard Road, the effects created by an experience designer or visual merchandiser are often considered works of art in themselves.

Experience designers are involved in every aspect of the retail experience creation--from choosing accent colours on walls to slanting the windows in the right direction. The next time you go into a boutique and feel as if you've just had an "experience"--you probably have, and someone went to a lot of trouble to make you feel at home.

Experience design is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments--each of which is a human experience--based on the consideration of an individual's or group's needs, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions.

An emerging discipline, experience design attempts to draw from many sources including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, product design, information design, information architecture, brand management, interaction design, service design, storytelling, heuristics, and design thinking.

In its commercial context, experience design is driven by consideration of the "moments of engagement"--touch points--between people and brands, and the ideas, emotions, and memories that these moments create. Commercial experience design is also known as experiential marketing, customer experience design, and brand experience.

Experience designers are often employed to identify existing touch points and create new ones, and then to score the arrangement of these touch points so that they produce the desired outcome.

In the broader environmental context, there is far less formal attention given to the design of the experienced environment, physical and virtual, although it's unnoticed, experience design is taking place.

Experience design, perhaps more than other forms of design, is transactive and transformative. Every experience designer is an "experiencer" who via his or her reactions is a designer of experience in turn. Experience design is not driven by a single design discipline. Instead, it requires a cross-discipline perspective that considers multiple aspects of the brand, business, environment, and experience from the product, packaging, and retail environment to the clothing and attitude of employees.

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Experience design seeks to develop the experience of a product, service, or event along the following dimensions:

* Duration (initiation, immersion, conclusion, and continuation)

* Intensity (reflex, habit, engagement)

* Breadth (products, services, brands, nomenclatures, channels/environment /promotion, and price)

* Interaction (passive or active or interactive)

* Triggers (all human senses, concepts, and symbols)

* Significance (meaning, status, emotion, price, and function).

While it's unnecessary for all experiences to be developed highly across all of these dimensions, the more in-depth and consistently a product or service is developed across them--the more responsive an offering is to a group's or customer's needs and desires it's likely to be. Enhancing the affordance of a product or service, its interface with people, is key to commercial experience design.

Businesses place great emphasis on the look of their customer environments, and often overlook the ambiance and mood created by music and more importantly, how this affects their customers.

Simon Faure-Field of Equal Strategy is an experience designer who has made a mark in the Singapore scene. His firm uses fragrances and music to enhance the customer experience of his clients' brands and encourage customers' buying patterns.

He says: "It's essentially about creating the ambiance to encourage you to spend more money. What retailers are looking to do is to use music and fragrancing as a new way to connect with their customers' emotions, stimulate their behaviour, but really sort of create that connection with the brand."

Thus if you had an environment that was, for example, selling electrical equipment, and people associate with technology energy; he would use a fragrance there that would be very refreshing and revitalising. He calls it a high arousal fragrance and this would be used in tandem with high-energy background music.

One of his clients in Raffles City called Ode to Art wanted to create a very sophisticated environment because they deal in big-ticket items. He says: "It needed the right sort of ambiance. We used a fragrance called 'Elegance' which is diffused in the shop. We have a system that takes a liquid fragrance that turns it into a dry vapour which is then released through the air-conditioning delivery system.

Equal strategy also develops signature fragrances. For example, it created one specifically for use in all of the Shangri-La business hotels in Asia. It gives customers a deja vu feeling, which is always a good feeling.

The visual merchandiser (VM), on the other hand, is responsible for conceptualising, designing, and implementing window and in-store displays for both online and brick and mortar retail stores. VMs must combine their creativity and artistic flair with technical knowhow to set up displays that maximise the space of the store while effectively catching the eye and appealing to the senses of their target customers.

A visual merchandiser creates window and interior displays in shops and department stores. The VM's chief aim is to maximise sales. Essentially, the VMs are responsible for the look of the store.

Displays are changed regularly and themes can be dictated by a number of factors, including: the seasons of the year; notable events in the calendar (such as Valentine's Day or Christmas); current fashions and trends; or promotional material. Most large retailers have a visual merchandising team. Typical activities will vary according to the roles within the team, but may include:

* conducting research based on lifestyle concepts and trends, as well as store and/or regional attributes;

* sketching designs;

* developing floor plans;

* sourcing materials;

* maximising the space and layout of the store;

* using available space to the best advantage

* dressing mannequins and making use of creative lighting for window displays;

* preparing for promotional events and dismantling displays at the end of promotional periods;

* giving feedback to head office and the other teams (such as buyers);

* visiting other stores in the area, working with in-store sales staff and helping to develop their understanding of presentation;

* setting up a flagship or concept store according to the company's latest design directives; photographing the store's windows, each wall and every display, in order to create a visual merchandising pack to send out to other stores (to ensure that all stores are consistent with the company brand and image);

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* implementing the designs and plans created by the visual merchandising manager and the creative director, this may involve manual work including lifting, carrying and climbing ladders.

Visual Merchandisers

Visual merchandisers may be employed by an agency, such as one providing services to the retail sector, but also to other clients such as events coordinators and to companies involved in the design and manufacturing stages of a product.

Weekend and late evening work is common as displays frequently need to be put up when the store is closed to minimise disruption to customers and staff. In large department stores and retail chains, VMs coordinate with the head office and other design teams (including buyers and sales staff) to ensure consistency with the corporate brand or image.

An attractive window display not only turns heads, it also lures the shopper into the store. Retail consultant and creative director Jose Maria Bustos of VMA Pte Ltd thinks Singapore's VM displays have improved greatly.

"During a recent walk through of some of Singapore's major malls, I came to a sudden realization--window displays here are becoming increasingly innovative, creative, and as a result, more interesting," he says.

Take specialist retailer The Hour Glass. At its new flagship store in Ngee Ann City, it has created enough room within the front window for a vibrant display. This is a major shift in direction from the days when all that one saw in its windows were rows of watches.