November 2009

Yes, I was out at 4 AM on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, in order to get some of the “door-buster” sale items retailers were offering to shoppers who hit the stores early. Yes, sometimes I am not terribly bright.

I bring this up because, besides the opportunity to let my readers know I am often lacking in common sense, this sojourn into Retail Hell allowed me to observe how different retailers and on-line merchants approached this first milestone of the holiday shopping season, and how (as I have stated ad nauseum) that experience matters.

First, an observation… in previous years big retailers like Wal-Mart sent cease and desist letters to sites such as bfads.net when those sites previewed their post-Thanksgiving ads weeks before they were “released.” This year, Wal-Mart not only allowed the sites to promote their sales but even partnered with them, finally realizing that those sites were free promotional vehicles. Lesson #1: If users aren’t aware of what you are offering, they will not have any interest in acquiring it.

Speaking of the 800-lb. gorilla of retail, Wal-Mart very smartly provided maps through their web site that allowed users to lookup their local stores to locate where the 10 big “door-buster” sales items were located. In previous years users had no idea where to go to get these special items, and this idea (combined with store workers who have printouts of where all the other sale items were located) helped with crowd control. Lesson #2: Be available to help your customers find what they are looking for.

Wal-Mart also made sure that most of their big discounted items were also offered online, allowing users who did not want to fight crowds to order online. Target, however, did not court much favor with shoppers as many of their door busters were not available on their website for purchase. Comments on deal sites such as fatwallet.com were near-unanimous in their criticism of the Target site. Lesson #3: A shopper is a shopper, no matter if they are on-line or off-line – offer the same sale items in both places.

In some instances e-commerce web sites crumbled under the weight of the traffic. Newegg.com was non-responsive under the intense server load of thousands of users hitting the site to get the specials they were offering. Lesson #4: your on-line experience is only as good as your web servers allow it to be.

Finally, item availability was key: if you do a “bait-and-switch” with customers, and only have three of the big sale items available, these customers will leave bitter and angry and you may lose their “good faith” forever. The smart retailers had enough stock to deal with demand, though it is never an exact science. Lesson #5. Be up-front about how many sale items you have to level-set expectations and hopes.
One last thought: I went shopping to primarily pick up deeply discounted DVDs and blu-ray movies, to pad my already-extensive collection. I was able to get many movies for as low as $2, and some recent new releases for $9. This, and other extensive mark-downs, were great for me and others who took advantage of such sales, but I think that many retails may learn to regret these discounts.

In a down economy, retailers have lowered their prices in order to get as many of the available purchasing dollars as they can. But, just as experience matters, expectations matter as well, and I think that deep discounts set a new price “baseline” that many consumers will now expect to get all the time. I know that in the future I will think twice about buying a new video release the week it comes out… if there is any likelihood that I can pick it up weeks later for half-off.

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Farmville.

Twitter.

All of the above have one thing in common: for many many users they are incredibly addictive experiences, sucking hours and hours of time away from them day after day. Updates from games like Farmville has become the only thing I see now when I go to Facebook. So, in response to this phenomena, I have two questions… First, is this a good or bad thing? Second, what makes these experiences addictive?

Let’s take the second question first: What makes these experiences addictive, and how can we leverage the design practices they have in our designs? Here’s what I have identified:

Positive reinforcement. When the users accomplish tasks in the programs, they get immediately rewards – leveling up, more friends or followers, a more profitable crop, etc. The reward is obviously tied to the effort and for many people, this is the only immediate gratification they get when they are sitting in front of a computer screen (because many online experiences, well, they aren’t very friendly or usable).

Immediacy. There is very little planning that users need to do to interact with these experiences – they can open the browser or access the game on their computers and in they go. This ties to my opinion that we are living in a time where the real-time web and the immediacy of now is filing in users free time. Bored? Play Tower Defense or write updates on Twitter.

Learnability. Almost all of these systems have simple, obvious control patterns. The most complex of them all, World of Warcraft, is still quite easy to understand with very little ramp-up. I maintain a mark of a good game or online experience is that novice users can pick up the controls (be they mouse or gamepad) and immediately start doing something. Those systems that have a demo or introductions… well, often they are covering over a crappy interaction model that is not easy to learn or use.

The social experience. You are not alone when you are working within these designs, and in many ways the whole purpose of the design is social in nature (see Twitter). We interact, we share ideas, we react to inputs that are not generated “in nature.” Which brings me to…

It stimulates us. We are an incredibly interactive species, and even our most sedentary crave stimulation. These experiences feeds that need to do something, and when it comes to stimulation, we wouldn’t be here as a species if we didn’t crave such stimulation (see: procreation).

Now, onto the second question: Is it good or bad for users? Well, I’m a libertarian so my immediate response is that it can be both – if users enjoy an experience then let them enjoy it to the fullest. It is, of course, the definition of “fullest” where things get hairy for some on the outside looking in. I think the obvious example is that any human being can die from drinking too much water too fast – there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

But., compared to other forms of entertainment that many abuse, society should not cast a worrying eye towards addicting online experiences. We have a lot more things to be concerned about.

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