01 The idea
A good product that just needed some care
The first time I tried the mirror, I liked it immediately. You stand in front of a camera, it takes your picture, you pick the men's or women's collection, and a few moments later you're wearing clothes you never tried on. The journey was already short and friendly.
So this was never a redesign. The interface looked a bit dated and a few moments felt clumsy, but the heart of it worked. I wanted to polish it without breaking what people already understood, which, as anyone who has renovated a kitchen knows, is the hardest kind of work.
02 What was off
Seven small problems, one shop floor
Before touching any screen, I spent time watching how the mirror behaved in the wild and wrote down everything that got in the way. Some of it was design. A surprising amount of it was cables.
- 01A tired interface
It worked, but it didn't look like a brand you'd want to try clothes from.
- 02Ten seconds of fun, forty of waiting
The interaction took under ten seconds. Then people waited around forty for their looks.
- 03No clear ending
Once the try-ons appeared, nobody knew what to do next.
- 04Married to one setup
It only looked sharp with a specific Samsung TV and phone mirroring combo.
- 05Too far away
Shoppers had to stand 2.4 m back, so people kept walking between them and the screen.
- 06Blurry alternatives
Simpler setups, like webcams and mini PCs, made the image noticeably worse.
- 07Crowd confusion
With more than one person in frame, the AI sometimes dressed the wrong one and gestures stopped working.
03 The 40-second wait
Turning waiting into something to watch
Forty seconds doesn't sound like much until you're standing alone in a store, staring at a loading screen while strangers walk past. So instead of hiding the wait, we split it into two moments with a job each.
First, we told people their image was being processed, so they knew the mirror hadn't forgotten about them. Then, for the last ten to fifteen seconds, we played a short, engaging video to hold their attention.
That gave the brand a twenty-second window to show a collection or a promotion, right when people were paying the most attention.
Every screen, before and after. The new interface is calmer and more on-brand, and the trigger is a raised hand instead of auto-detection, which used to fire whenever someone wandered past.
On the right, the new rhythm of the wait: a short notification that buys the camera time, then content that keeps people around until their looks are ready.
04 Cameras & crowds
Less Samsung, more store
The mirror depended on a very particular Samsung pairing, and our first attempts with friendlier hardware, like webcams, looked disappointingly soft. So we did what you do with stubborn things: we tested, adjusted, and tested again, for many sessions, with people walking behind the user in every number and distance we could think of.
Focal distance. Closer means fewer strangers walking through your photo.
2.4→1.3 mWebcam quality. Tuned until it delivered a crisp, professional image.
Full HDTotal experience. First usable look in under two minutes.
5→2 minLongest single wait. Never a long stare at a spinner again.
<10 sPerson detection. Recalibrated so the mirror dresses you, not the person behind you.
Calibrated
05 Going live
And then, a real store
After all the testing (and a healthy amount of worrying), the mirror launched at Highstil's store in the Premium Outlet in São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo.
of the people who started the experience stayed until the very end. For something that asks strangers to stand still in a busy store, that told us the new flow and the new hardware were doing their jobs.