Edited on Jun 23, 2026. By EPR Editorial Team.
Walk into Nike's concept store in West Los Angeles, opened in 2018, and you've entered a working example of what happens when digital and physical retail converge. 4,557 square feet designed to blend the convenience of the Nike app with high-quality human connection. The store was an experiment in what brands can do when they treat the in-store experience as an extension of the digital one — not a separate channel competing with it.
The lessons from that experiment have shaped how serious consumer brands think about user experience ever since.
The old UX and the new UX
The old UX discipline treated the website as the brand's primary surface. Designers worried about button placement, page-load speed, mobile responsiveness, the cart funnel. The discipline was — and remains — real and important.
What changed across the past decade is that UX expanded beyond the website. The buyer interacts with the brand across the brand's own surfaces (site, app, store), across third-party surfaces (Amazon, social platforms, retailer apps), and across creator content the brand does not own. A unified user experience across all of those surfaces is the new design discipline.
The two disciplines are not in conflict. The new one wraps the old one.
The Nike case — from concept store to omnichannel
Nike's West LA concept store was the canonical experiential UX moment of the late-2010s retail era. The store integrated the Nike app, in-store digital displays, member-exclusive product, and the kind of staffed customer service that traditional digital-only brands cannot replicate. The store was the experiment. The lesson was that the digital and physical surfaces can converge inside the brand's controlled environment if the design discipline holds.
That lesson has held. The concept-store model has expanded. Nike continues to operate stores that combine app integration with in-store experience. The broader retail industry has followed — Apple, Glossier, Warby Parker, Allbirds, and the broader DTC category all run versions of the integrated-channel model Nike's 2018 store helped popularize.
What Nike — and every other serious consumer brand — has had to figure out since is that the customer journey extends well beyond the brand's owned surfaces. The buyer researches before visiting any Nike property. They compare across competitor sites. They check Reddit, YouTube, and creator content. They look at retailer listings. The brand's job is to be present and consistent across all of those surfaces, not just to perfect the experience inside its own four walls.
What buyers actually do
The modern buyer journey has five steps that operate together.
Initial awareness. The buyer encounters the brand through advertising, creator content, a friend's recommendation, or organic discovery on a platform they already use.
Research. The buyer compares products across multiple sources — search, social, creator reviews, retailer listings, third-party publication coverage.
Validation. The buyer cross-checks the recommendation by asking people they trust, reading customer reviews, or looking at independent comparison content.
Purchase. The buyer transacts — either on the brand's site, in a brand store, or through a retailer (Amazon, Target, a specialty retailer, a marketplace).
Post-purchase. The buyer's experience of the product feeds back into the broader information environment. Reviews, social posts, recommendations to friends. The post-purchase experience shapes the next buyer's research.
UX work that addresses only one of these steps — the brand's own website, say — misses the work that compounds across the full journey.
Five principles for modern UX
1. Design across the journey, not just the brand site. The buyer's experience starts before they ever visit the brand's owned surface. The brands that compound understand the full path and design across all of it.
2. Treat third-party surfaces as part of the brand experience. Amazon listings, retail-partner pages, creator reviews, social mentions. None of it is fully controlled by the brand, but all of it shapes how the brand is experienced. The brands that engage thoughtfully across these surfaces produce stronger buyer experiences than the brands that ignore them.
3. Make owned surfaces fast, clear, and useful. The fundamentals of website and app UX still matter. Page load speed, mobile responsiveness, conversion flow, accessibility. The brands that get the fundamentals right compound across years.
4. Integrate digital and physical. The Nike concept store, the Apple Store model, the Glossier showroom approach — each demonstrates that physical retail works best when integrated with digital. The brands that treat their stores as separate from their digital experience leave value on the table.
5. Listen to what buyers say outside the brand's channels. Reddit, YouTube, social media, retail-platform reviews. The buyer's actual experience of the brand surfaces in those channels in ways customer surveys never capture. The brands that monitor seriously learn things the formal feedback channels miss.
What still holds from the old discipline
Know the user. Still true. Understanding who the buyer actually is, what they care about, and how they make decisions remains the foundation of every UX program.
Don't copy. Still true. The UX patterns that work for Pinterest don't work for Hoka. Each brand needs its own experience design that fits its own audience.
Meet the customer where they are. More true than ever. The customer is across multiple surfaces. The brand needs to show up coherently across all of them.
Keep going. Most true of all. Strong UX compounds across years of sustained investment. The brands that treat UX as a continuous discipline outperform the brands that treat it as a series of campaigns.
FAQ
What is omnichannel UX?
Omnichannel UX is the discipline of designing a coherent customer experience across all the surfaces a buyer interacts with — the brand's own site and app, physical stores, third-party retailers, social and creator content, and the broader environment where the brand is encountered. The goal is consistency and quality across the full journey, not just the brand's owned surfaces.
What can brands learn from the Nike West LA concept store?
The store demonstrated that digital and physical can converge when the design discipline integrates them as one experience rather than as separate channels. The Nike app, member-exclusive product, in-store digital displays, and staffed service all worked together. The model has been widely emulated since.
What's the highest-leverage UX investment for most consumer brands?
The fundamentals — fast, clear, accessible owned surfaces, integrated with the platforms where buyers actually research and transact. Most brands underinvest in the fundamentals while over-investing in trendy design moves that don't survive scrutiny.
How should brands measure UX?
Conversion rate, time to purchase, retention, customer satisfaction, and the qualitative measures that come from actually talking to customers. The vanity metrics (page views, session length) tell less about UX quality than the conversion-and-retention metrics that capture whether the experience actually delivered value.
