One of the interesting concepts starting to emerge is the idea of going to a store but placing what is essentially an internet order.

Ecko Unlimited has experimented with web kiosks at their stores where customers can browse for products not carried in that store, then print out an invoice and pay with cash (or charge) at the register. The product is then sent to the customer as if they had made an internet purchase. This allows Ecko to essentialy sell their entire line from every store without having to stock every single item, and also allows customers to make an internet purchase with cash.

A new mall concept called Epicenter takes this idea even further, creating an entire shopping complex based on the idea that customers will browse and try out products in a mall-type setting but will have their orders shipped to them as if the were completed online. Rachel Thorner from the New York Times describes it well:

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The nucleus of Epicenter will consist of two parts - the Buypod, a hand-held electronic device, and electronic kiosks located throughout the mall.

Under the concept, customers will enter the mall and register their credit card information, which will then be put into their Buypods. As customers browse merchandise, they can use their Buypod - which, as the name suggests, looks something like an Apple iPod - to scan the labels of items they want to buy.

Although a small number of items will available to take home, most orders will be sent directly to the warehouse, where they will be filled and shipped. The electronic kiosks will print receipts and can be used to cancel orders, if needed.”

(from NYT article 5/23/05 — full text available at corpwatch.com)

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The goal with these ventures is to bridge one of the major gaps that online commerces faces — the fact that consumers cannot hold the items. With many items, testing/feeling/using is paramount to the buying decision, and the internet will not be able to provide this in the forseeable future.

Of course the other major hurdle for internet shopping is shipping charges, which I imagine would still come into play in kiosk-warehouse shopping.

Lastly, the major benefit to internet shopping, at least from my perspective, is completely lost. Convenience! Epicenter is an interesting concept, but the main reason I shop online is because I can do it without having to go to the mall. I hate malls, and I doubt Epicenter will change that. (I also can’t believe they want people to pre-register before going to the mall — that seems like too much work for lazy America!)

During a presentation at eTail Philadelphia, someone from Sears mentioned that a lot of people visit both Sears.com and Kmart.com to find out information about their stores, i.e. location, phone number, etc. and that they have spent a lot of time fixing up these areas to best serve these customers.

Being a big believer in serving your customers needs, I agreed that this was an important area to focus on, especially if metrics show that it is a high traffic area. In fact, just the week before I had visited Kmart.com to find out when my neighborhood store closed on particular evening. I found the store information page quite easily, but there was one major problem — the website didn’t list the store hours!

So, I had to call the store to find out when they closed. This is hardly customer-centric design — if you know customers come to find out information about a particular store, best practice would be to include all the information that is important to these customers. Sears.com in particular has some great options in this area — you can specify what features you are looking for in a particular store (auto center, outlet, within a mall, etc.) and each page also lists which departments are available for each store. It doesn’t, however, show the store hours!

I’m sure that many people who click on “Store Locator” or similar are trying to find out where a particluar store is located near them, or how to get there on a map. All the same, however, I’m also sure that many people are looking for store hours, and making a customer pick up the phone and call the store after they have already taken the time to visit the website is not a very good way to treat anyone.

There may be some logistical issues to making sure the store hours are correct on the website, and as such not showing them is certianly better than showing the incorrect ones. However, if a company deems this service important enough to have on thier homepage and metrics show that customers do use it, figuring out how to show the correct store hours seems like something worth doing. With the right system, the stores might even be able to keep the information up-to-date themselves, even showing special holiday hours messages when applicable (a time when many people are interested in whether a store’s hours have changed).

Incidentally, Nordstrom does a nice job on their store pages, showing not only a map and contact information, but also point-to-point driving directions, store hours and a listing of upcoming store events (although I’m not sure why a search by “store number” would be necessary — this doesn’t seem like something a customer would know).

(File Under: Yes, these are the things I think about)

During a presentation at eTail Philadelphia, one of the speakers was talking through some year names — oh-five, oh-six, etc., when something he said startled me. He said “oh-ten” (as in 2010). Although technically it seems correct, it was completely unexpected to hear someone say three digits of a year name (or is it number?).

It got me thinking — for my entire life, year names have had a certain rhythm: seventy-six, eighty-five, ninety-four, etc. “Year two-thousand” totally bucked the trend, but that seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and the millenium hype only fueled that thought. “Oh-one” and “oh-two”, followed, quickly returning the cadence of year names back to normal. Even “oh-ten” seems like it might be usable, but “oh-eleven” sounds completely preposterous. Then again, saying just “eleven” sounds ridiculous too!

The bottom line here is that a paradigm shift is upon us — the way we say year names will have to change, if only for a few years. It will be quite intereting to observe how people adjust to it.

I recently visited Hawaii and was struck by the idea of Tourism Usability, which is my way to describe the way a tourist destination ensures that visitors are able to get around easily, find what they are looking for, and generally have a great time when they visit. Obviously there are tourism boards and the like that focus on these ideas, but I’ve never heard of actual usability concepts being applied in this arena. Giving “usability tests” to vacationers, although perhaps tricky from a logistical standpoint, just might yield some really useful results. Beyod that, studying the ideas that we apply to the web and beyond could be quite applicable to building great vacation destinations.

As is probably not all that surprising, this idea came to me based on some bad experiences, most notably with regards to Hawaiian street signage. On two seperate occasions, a road that we wanted to take was closed with no explanation and no detour instructions… Just a “Road Closed” sign! We were forced to get onto a different HIGHWAY with no idea of whether it would take us to our destination. Another time, as we were headed to Honolulu, we discovered that following signs that said Honolulu actually took us nowhere near where we were going. It occured to me that since tourism is Hawaii’s number one industry, they really should take more care that their signage be easy to understand and follow for people driving these roads for the very first time. Getting lost a bunch of times doesn’t really add to the quality of a vacation. (Of course, Hawaii has so many other things going for it, this didn’t really take too much away.)

Oh, and one other thing — If someone from the Hawaii tourism board is reading this and decides that they need a usability expert, you, um, have my email.

I previously posted about the iGo air/car adapter that I picked up on eBay for a long plane trip, so I wanted to swing back and report on how it went.

The iGo comes with several different “adapters” that are made to work in the various AC plugs for different devices. Only one fit my laptop, and although it didn’t seem to fit perfectly I was able to verify in my car that it worked properly. (I also checked on the iGo website to make sure I had the right adapter for the right computer, which was confirmed.)

Each seat on our trip did happen to have an AC plug, which was a combination of luck and the use of SeatGuru.com, a site that describes each seat on commercial airliners, so I was able to plug in the PC on each leg of the journey. As such, we were able to enjoy DVD movies throughout, which was especially convenient on 3-4 hour rides that had no movie (and even on 6-hour trips that showed Miss Congeniality 2).

In conclusion, if you travel a lot and would like to use your laptop without worrying about the battery dying, I recommend the iGo as a worthy, relatively inexpensive option.

The next PhiCHI social is set for August 17, 2005 at 6:30pm, at Alma De Cuba in Philly (1623 Walnut Street). Come out and talk shop over a few drinks.

There is also a center city happy hour special that evening…