Where online meets offline. Metaphors for e-commerce.
I've made a strange self-observation recently. Being so engrained in online, working in the field, churning web projects and talking web apps over beer with friends, I got into this habit of looking down at the so called - Offline. Offline was lame, it was 1.0, passe and backward - I could hear me thinking. Offline seemed like a different world. Distant and irrelevant world. My business was online, my users were online, my friends were certainly online. Pretty much everyone lived and breathed online. That was a great dream - happily, I was on a different planet. Or was I?
I was in that false mind-frame for a long time, until one day I came to a realization that the business I've created - pstro.pl - was destined to be more offline than online. Online was just a conduit for offline emotions of my users. Not only were my users offline (I sort-of sensed that before), so were to be my paying customers and the very businesses my users wrote reviews about. I had to accept a fact that, in order to succeed with pstro.pl I had to be more offline than online. My sales-force, my marketing, and my thinking, all needed to be offline anchored or at least firmly touching offline if I wanted to make a difference.
Today, I make it a point to learn from offline and inspire myself with examples, cases and successes from offline. It's almost a game. If I have a problem in online, I try to see how a similar case was solved offline. And once I started doing that, a whole new perspective opened up.
Someone said, that real innovations and breakthroughs happen on the boundary of domains. In that weird zone where blue ocean dissolves into red waters, in that funny spectrum where you can't tell one color from another. In the conceptual no-mans land, where every concept seems out of place, and certainly where busy (read: blind) people don't stop-by.
I've created couple of scenarios, in attempt to open up our creative mind when thinking about online:
- What if online products experienced wear and tear? An unmistakable quality of some real-world items is that they get better with time as they wear-off, could that work in online?
- What if attention span of each new customer arriving at your site resembled that of a 3 year old receiving a new toy for birthday?
- What would you see if you stapled yourself to your online order? Would it be a long / short / enjoyable journey?
- Imagine you have to have a changing room in your online store, what would it be?
- What if there was no SEO, no search engine crawlers indexing your site. Would your site look, feel different to your users? would they like it more?
- What if your users were entirely text-blind (they actually are)?
- What if switching from / to a competing website was equivalent to switching from car to car (note: stearing wheel, all controls, gauges, everything are always in the same place, regardless if you drive Kia or BMW)
- What if customers visiting your site could actually see and talk to each other, like they do in real shops
- Have you ever seen that guy wandering cluelessly between isles trying to find one particular product. Multiply him 1000 times and picture them on your site. Scarry?
Finally, read Why We Buy. Paco UnderHill is to offline shoping science, what Jackob Nielsen is to online user experience.
Last but not least. Go find your offline counterpart. A business that does what you do, but offline. Talk to the owner, take him/her to the pub, drink some beers and ... learn.
4 comments
Feb 04, 2010
Michael S said...
Thanks for sharing Maciek. Offline is certainly I forgotten topic these days. You opened my eyes a little bit. But it is true, we have to go back to basics and observe what is actually surrounding us. And certainly it is not the online world. I think the more translation from offline world you make in your online product, the better community and satisfaction you will create. Certainly things like talking with other users on the same page or any sort of communication is going to boom in some way soon. Currently the standard for the communication exchange is the commenting system. But I think there is a need for website owners to create chat's or some interactive feedback boards to enchance that experience. I also think that in near future there will be a lot of online > moving back to offline world, showcasing search screens in shops to quickly find the items you are looking in the store and offcourse it is already happening. One thing to be sure of, is that the gap between those world is not going to be growing but it will be shrinking and I am interested where it will take us. Good post, and I am looking to spend some quality time this weekend in the offline world for a change ;)
Feb 14, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
Yeap. I come to the conclusion that the online / offline division most of us in the industry are fixated on, is absolutely artificial and it often takes great deal of effort to go beyond that thinking. Go inspire yourself in the offline. Jesus, we talk like we're in Matrix or something :) can't be that bad.
Feb 20, 2010
Tom Sieron said...
"- What if attention span of each new customer arriving at your site resembled that of a 3 year old receiving a new toy for birthday?" – I thought you actually meant "what if their attention span did NOT resemble that of a 3yo." .. now that'd be grand! :)Thanks for food for thought and for the book idea – added to my wish list.
Feb 20, 2010
Maciek Saganowski said...
hehe, cheers Tom, you might be right, attention of users is scarce these days :) let's cherish and make use of every second of it
