Visual neighbourhoods
Products were positioned near other items that looked and felt similar.
2017–2021 · Visual product discovery
Stylefinder
A map-like fashion browser that arranged thousands of products by visual similarity, turning shopping into exploration.
- Format
- Web platform
- Interaction
- Pan, zoom and explore
- System
- Polymer, Node.js, Elasticsearch
- Archive
- 2017–2021
The idea
Shopping as spatial exploration
Stylefinder replaced the endless product grid with a navigable map. Similar items sat near one another, so zooming and panning became a natural way to move through a catalogue and discover alternatives.
The wider platform brought together products from hundreds of brands, then supported search, categories, refinement, accounts and a browser extension around very large generated product maps.
What shaped it
Deep-zoom browsing
A tiled renderer kept large product maps fluid and explorable.
Natural discovery
Zoom, pan and inspect instead of stepping through rigid result pages.
A full platform
Product ingestion, search, accounts and browser tooling supported the experience.
