online and in-store

Over the past 5-8 years the trend has been for companies to move services online in order to reduce costs streamline business processes and attract wider audiences. Is it time that online and in-store met in the middle of the road?

Moneysupermarket.com may have started this movement with their interactive shop window on Oxford Street at Christmas time. The window allowed shoppers to quickly and easily compare prices between stores whilst shopping.

With a little bit of creative thinking there could be bundles of opportunities for online services to appear on the high street:

• Design, save, share and compare your own bathroom/kitchen/living room within the furniture department of a department store
• Use mash-up technology to find products and stock counts when in-store
• Save gondola space in entertainment stores by using the online catalogue to browse music before buying the physical products
• Make more of the valuable space taken up by fitting rooms and reduce the annoying fitting room queues by using photo sharing sites to try on clothes and makeup

Both Tesco and Argos do a good job of blending their online experience with in-store due to their ‘order online and pick up in-store’ offering… but there is still the opportunity to take retail to the next ‘interactive’ level.

Blending desktop and online

Loving the way that some interactions and widgets are coming into the mainstream making the everyday use of the web much more similar to the desktop experience.

Take a look at www.macwarehouse.co.uk this site manages to provide a good experience whilst making a play upon quite a lot of features that you would expect to find on a Mac computer.

Widgets are widely available but I quite like the Yahoo library.

I don't care how it works!!

Ok, so not a title that reflects my passion for interaction design but I thought I'd open up with a thought that I have been harbouring for a while now.

Have you ever seen the early Mercedes Gullwing? The entire car is gorgeous and the dashboard is so beautifully crafted that it's no wonder that you just want to touch it. I have a sneaking suspicion, that if you're ever lucky enough to get to sit in one of these cars that the first thing you will do is drool and the second is reach out and touch one of the many tempting dials, switches or buttons!




Why? Well I can't scientifically explain it but there is definitley a correlation between stuff that looks beautiful and tactile and stuff that you just want to touch...

So how does this relate to online? I believe that websites can be analysed to the n'th degree to optimise traffic and user journeys but there will always be a degree of animal attraction. Perhaps if the site is beautifully crafted users may enjoy discovering the functionality over having an interface with everything explained.

Photo from sherlock77 on Flickr