Not too long ago, we were shopping online for flowers. It didn’t take too much searching to figure out that the standard online flower shop – alongside many another online retail service – is missing that certain something. In fact, there is plenty of discussion about the fact that online retail lacks something in the way of experience, you can find an interesting exploration here.
On your typical online flower space, you find the categorized navigation that became the user-experience standard through the mid-2000’s and is still widespread today:
Typical online flower retail
Same concept, found throughout most online retail
My usual approach to finding more modern and innovative search results is a simple del.icio.us search, which lead us to this site where you drag-and-drop your own bouquet:
click-and-drag a custom bouquet
We at first overlooked that the site is intended to send an online bouquet only by email. But it wasn’t long after searching the other sites before it became clear that this pick-and-choose-features kind of approach would be much appreciated. Particularly for the girlfriend searching for the flowers, since she wanted to make a very personal and thoughtful selection – the flowers were for a funeral.
In fact to me, it stuck me as odd that many to most stores made some kind of disclaimer about the lack of certainty, in terms of size of color and even type of flowers that would actually be delivered after ordering. When it came to bouquet size, many retailers had a general Large/Medium/Small selection, often without measurements. We really got the impression that when buying flowers online, most people just don’t put in that kind of personal effort that involves wanting a certain color palate, certain kind of vase or basket, certain kinds of flowers.
Maybe it is simply that our view of what flower-buying should look like is just very different from how most people conceptualize this particular process – this is interesting enough. But we got into a discussion of how other retail categories, ones that we can be sure people put a lot of personal effort into, still use that old-fashioned categorized approach. There is an obvious one here - men’s and women’s clothing, dresses especially.
Here is a category where the typical website architecture makes an assumption that is clearly a bit suspect: that people shop for clothing already knowing what they want, and can thus find what they need simply by clicking an appropriate category. Men can click things like “Polo’s” and “Jeans”; for women it’s hardly more than “Blouses,” maybe getting a couple subcategories like “sleeveless” or “halter.”
I think here we find where some of that lacking online experience is most apparent: retail sites are organized in a way that simply does not match the way we actually shop for clothing. When we go into an actual store, sure we often have an idea of what we’re looking for. But that idea isn’t made up of basic clothing categories, its made of things like patterns, cuts, designs, and colors.
This is why we were drawn to the drag-and-drop bouquet, and why people are drawn to sites like Studio 28 and StyleShake, where you select design elements of your future garment in a logical step-by-step process:
It’s certainly no hot-off-the-press trend – we’ve called this customization, and it’s been a clear web 2.0 staple. But I think the insightful thing to take away is to remember that customization works on a simpler principle than is immedately apparent – the fundamental principle that we hardly ever immediately know what we really want. Certainly we like to have personalized, customized, semi-one-of-a-kind stuff. But in an important way, these sites let us tease out what we’re really looking for, one element at a time.
Filed under: Asking the right questions, Universal Truths | Leave a Comment
Tags: experience, insight, search, shopping
No Responses Yet to “How seldom we know what we’re really looking for”