Why All Saints Spitalfields is my favorite mobile app right now

On a recent shopping trip to downtown NYC, I had my first experience with the All Saints Spitalfields brand. A very distinct British clothing retailer. Aside from the brilliantly crafted environment, which tells the brand's story quite well, I also found that All Saints had installed iPads around the perimeter of each department. Each iPad was running what I thought was a mobile version of their website, but turned out to be their own retail app. I was pleasantly surprised by this app and thought I'd share a few details:

Ad Images
- the impact and placement of the images provide a great link to the brand
 - not just product shots, but brand/advertising imagery which dimension the brand
 - the app incorporates images alongside it's functional (and very usable) UI
 - the images make the browsing experience quite pleasant

No Icons
- they haven't gone icon crazy
- All Saints does not use icons in their mobile nav
- at first I thought the icons hadn't loaded, then I realized that it was my own complacency with the "over-iconization" of mobile experience
- people tend to think, since there is an app for everything, they need an icon for everything
- I agree with that decision, why keep reinventing icons for everyday e-commerce activities?
- how many different styles of shopping cart do you really need?
- while icons do aid in the scannability of UI, in this case the nav is simple enough to still be usable with text only, as there are only five items
- this leaves the brand mark as the only graphic visual and thus makes it a bit more special
- the brand's typographic style is used in the UI, it's both very useful and on brand

The Only Cons
 - Dull loading screen, given the time it takes for the app to load, it would be nice to have something better to look at
- The app can be a little slow when you get to part that matters most, the point of purchase
- I'm still not sure how I got to the purchase screen
- Perhaps some imagery from the brand's distinct story of craftsmanship or retail environments
- Some of this story should also make its way to the web experience

Wrap Up:
- A few bugs to iron out, but all in all a great example of how brand experience and user experience can come together

The app is available for download here.