* Gearhead: Programming your brain * Backspin: 2007: The Year of Being Outraged? * Gibbsblog: The past 7 days
Gearhead: Programming your brain
Welcome to the new improved Gearhead 2007, featuring greater word economy, improved hunt-and-peck typing, nearly guaranteed accurate responses to your questions and the best crash-test ratings in the industry. Gearhead is ready and willing to enhance your digital lifestyle for 2007.
To read this week’s Gearhead, click here.
Backspin: 2007: The Year of Being Outraged?
The dawn of a new year should be a time of reflection, of weighing what happened in the last year and planning to make the next 12 months better. I have reflected on the happenings of last year and I would sum up 2006 as The Year of Not Enough Outrage.
To read this week’s Backspin, click here.
Gibbsblog: The past 7 days
Online Retail: Are We Buying or Shopping?
Jim Sterne and I had our almost monthly lunch last week and he commented that a major problem with on-line retailing is that it is mostly about buying rather than shopping. Interesting …
In the real world when you go out to buy a gift you either know what you want and buy it or you browse, looking for that particular gift that will fit the occasion and the person (unlike a certain group of people I know who bought their grandmother an electric chainsaw for her birthday and demoed it by slicing her kitchens chairs in half … that is, of course, another story).
On-line things are similar when you know what you want. You find a supplier, find the gift you had in mind, add it to your cart, and virtually head for the checkout. It is when you don’t know what you want that things aren’t so smooth.
The problem is that the on-line shops I’ve browsed have been driven by language rather than vision. This is a problem as the process of shopping in the real world primarily involves sight, touch, and smell with sound and text coming in as poor seconds. Even on Web sites where pictures are used the organization of the site usually reflects some kind of descriptive hierarchy so there’s a lack of “flow” — sliding from one display to the next — that makes Web browsing and real world browsing are two very different things.
Can online shopping be achieved? I think it can but it still won’t be like real world shopping — without touch and smell there’s really no comparison — the experience can’t engage you the a visceral, emotional manner that, for example, a Christmas display in a department store can (it is things like the lighting, the sounds, and the smells that engage your attention so effectively).
To really make on-line shopping work requires rethinking how products are presented, how they are juxtaposed, and how rich the detail can be made to make up for the sensory void that exists. This requires rich media and slick delivery such that the user feels entertained and involved.
Without Web sites developing the tools and vocabulary to support that kind of user engagement, on-line retail will remain nothing more than a simple buying process.
Thanks for lunch, Jim!
Time Sink #17: Numbers Hunt
In this game all you need do is place the cursor on the numbers (no need to “click” on them) in sequence from 1 through 33. As you do, you are timed, and at the end when you have eliminated all the numbers, it will provide the total length it took you in seconds that it took.
Time Sink #16: Attack of the Sprouts
Hate sprouts? Kill ’em off as they attack your Xmas dinner. (And what about that intro song? Outstanding.)
