The Barcode Hunt

I'm a frequent Costco shopper—buying things in bulk just makes sense for a growing family. Every trip has the same ritual to it; find the things we need, avoid the things we don't, try lots of samples (a.k.a. lunch) and then... wait in the enormous lines. Many people dread going to Costco solely because of the long lines. I would hazard to guess that this is one of the biggest friction points in their customer experience.

So, what's the problem? While there are lots of small factors that slow things down, one stands out in my mind—I like to call it 'the barcode hunt'.

To illustrate: By the end of my Costco trip I'm ready to be done, and the toddler that's usually with me is WAY ready to be done. So, while waiting in line I try to organize my cart so the checker can scan the large items in the cart and get us on our way quickly. But invariably there are a few things—always heavy and bulky on the bottom of the cart—that need to be moved to find the barcode. By my guesstimation, this box dance burns about 30 seconds per transaction. Multiply that by all the shoppers Costco sees in a day, and you can see why the lines are always so long.

But what could Costco do to speed things up?

Yeah, in a future world of RFID and spimes this problem will wondrously disappear—or so we've been told (I'm still waiting for my jetpack). But in the short term, there's lots of time being wasted.

My modest proposal could save those 30 seconds: Print the barcode on all 6 sides of as many products as possible.

Every item in the cart would be scannable in any position, speeding the checker's task and getting me on my way faster.

A change like this could work wonders for checkout lines everywhere, including self-checkout kiosks. (for some fun ethnography: go watch people using self-checkout kiosks find the barcodes on products—it's an eye opening experience). But I focus on Costco for two specific reasons: motivation and muscle.

Motivation

Costco has one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the country. They sell good products at good prices, stand behind all the goods they sell and go out of their way to treat their employees well. They have crafted a customer experience that, with the exception of the lines, is top notch. Having proven that they 'get' customer experience, it seems that a relatively small change like this could take hold.

Muscle

Costco is an 800lb retail gorilla that uses their market muscle to get better pricing and quality from their suppliers. If they choose to, they could dictate barcode location rules to their suppliers. Costco also has a huge house brand, 'Kirkland Signature', where they have complete control of the final form of their packaging and could easily shift to a 6 barcode design.

How about it Costco, will you make my next lunch visit, err I mean, shopping trip a bit more streamlined?

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

The Drawing Board: Fill 'er up

We find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

In this episode, we look at car information systems. Sure there’s a ton of useful data in there, but most of it is trapped behind a series of menus, idly waiting for us to enter the correct sequence of commands to unlock it. We imagine a car information system that’s more forthcoming with the data it already has, making us feel like we’ve got a great road-trip buddy in the passenger seat instead of a computer.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

A better algorithm isn't enough to fix Netflix's recommendations

There has been a lot of hype recently as Netflix announced provisional winners of their million dollar contest to improve their recommendation algorithm. The goal was to improve matching by 10%. Since it took over 50,000 entrants the better part of three years trying to improve past 10% this is probably a trick they can only pull off once. Given that their current recommendation engine does a miserable job of recommending movies for me, even a 10% increase isn't likely to be particularly satisfying.

I've rated just shy of 800 movies on Netflix;and just over 150 items on Amazon, yet Amazon's recommendations are usually satisfying while Netflix struggles to accurately recommend any movies I'd like to see. This isn't a case of esoteric movie tastes, in fact I'm fairly mainstream, largely preferring the entertainment of a summer blockbuster to the intellectualism of an indie documentary. The books I like are the opposite: non-fiction, obscure, expensive, limited runs, or out-out-of-print, in short; not popular. And still, Amazon recommends the right books.

Pandora is a music service which delights me by consistently recommending new music to me which I like. Netflix can't give me great recommendations. Amazon and Pandora do. Why?

Clearly the algorithm is a critical part of any good recommendation engine. But there seem to be limits to what can be accomplished just by tweaking the math. If Netflix can only squeeze a 10% improvement out of the calculation for recommendations, where can they turn to get additional increases in quality?

Tweaking what happens before and after the algorithm seems to be the only other opportunities. Both of these are ultimately interaction design solutions. Let's take a look at a few approaches to recommendations used by Netflix, Amazon and Pandora and see how they lead to different results.

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Dear Mr. Jobs, I have some ideas about how to improve your phone

Everyone knows that the iPhone is pretty great. The vast majority of my clients offer it up as their first example when I ask them, "What products on the market that represent the kind of experience you want to deliver?"

I mostly really like mine. But I've got to say there are a couple things about it that really bug me. Right up there after the fact there's no one-gesture way of switching between different email inboxes is the way the little red notifications circles work with the phone.

It's a bit confusing, plus requires unnecessary work

Whenever someone calls me, I don't answer, and the caller leaves a voicemail, a "2" is displayed in the little red circle over the Phone icon on the Home screen like this:

Maybe I'm kind of a simpleton, but doesn't that kind of make it seem like I've missed two calls? Or that I've got two voicemails?

And that isn't the worst of it. As confusing as that is, after using it for a while, I now mostly remember how it works (and even if I don't, it doesn't really cause me any real inconvenience.)

The really irritating part is when I go to the phone application, there are now two new red dots — one over Recent and one over Voicemail, like this:

Every single time, after I go listen to the voicemail, I have to click over to Recent to make that red dot with the number in it go away. Of course I know I missed the call, I've already listened to the voicemail. Why do I have to actively get rid of this extra dot?

You might be thinking "Relax, idiot. This isn't Ms. Pac Man. You don't have eat all the red dots." But I kind of do, don't I? Otherwise, the red dot starts to become useless. This might be fine with all your customers who bought an iPhone to replace their Razr, and those who don't have expectations of their phone as a productivity tool. But my mobile is actually a pretty important part of the way I manage my work and more importantly, my attention.

What if we changed things around just a bit?

The easiest fix is to just change the logic so that for any missed call, you only display one circle. If they leave a message, it's over Voicemail; if they don't, it's over Recent. (Which works for the transition between when it's just a missed call, and when they've left a message. The number just switches from Recent to Voicemail when a message is left.)

But it still kind of bugs me that a given phone call can be represented in two different places. It seems a lot simpler to have a single list of calls to scan through when I pick up my phone after a meeting. Maybe it could look something like this:

It would work like a combination of Recent and Voicemail...

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A reminder about system conventions

I'm a Facebook user. I'm also an iPhone user. I'm also a bit lazy about updates. So having the Facebook app on the iPhone seems like a good idea. But there's one interface element in the application that frustrates me and makes me prone to not want to use it at all.

If you use your iPhone to email, you're used to sending it using the SEND control in the upper right hand corner of a message. It's a good place to be for right-handed people, as it's easy for your right thumb to jump right there. I send emails all the time from my phone, so I'm really used to this behavior.

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Thinking outside the boxee

Yup that’s right. First they had the idea to get the Internet on your TV (remember WebTV?) then it was all about TV on the Internet (Hulu, CBS, CNN, etc. ) and now we’ve got TV on the Internet put back on your TV (boxee).

For those of you not already in the know, boxee is a multi-platform media center with a 10-foot interface for aggregating video, music and photos that exist both offline and online. Others have failed in this space, but the boxee offering pushes the paradigm of content distribution and consumption in some interesting ways.

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A good design critique

How do you thoroughly critique a design without crucifying the designer? What are ways of critiquing that result in better designs, rather than defensive justifications?

Scott Berkun explores a model for design critique in a detailed post, but I'm interested in the little stuff that works for your design team in day-to-day practice.

At Cooper, our teams often work together for a year or more. It is important for us to create a dynamic of cooperation, but great design often happens when we push on assumptions and challenge the first iteration. We want to encourage this critique, but make sure that it doesn't derail the meeting.

Why is that good?

It's pretty common to hear a skeptical Cooper designer begin a critique with some variant of the question, "Why is that good?" Many ways to express disagreement have negative effects on the meeting or relationship. "That won’t work because," or "But what about." These tend to bring momentum to a halt. Designers must stop, defend their ideas, or chase objections.

As anyone who has faced a blank whiteboard knows, once the ink gets flowing it is important to run with it and see where the idea goes. Communication strategies of design partners can enhance or detract from this process. By asking to see the goodness, we focus on enlightenment, encouraging our partner to help us see what they see. Also, asking an open-ended question is an acceptably naïve way of pushing your design partner to step up and show you what is going on in their mind.

At the core, we want our teams to feel comfortable in expressing healthy disagreement, and to focus on clarifying rather than justifying.

What are ways that your team has developed to critique design while maintaining harmony on the team?

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Checkout checkup: Sites that get it right

Recent reports on the holiday shopping season show that despite the tough economy resulting in a sharp decline in spending overall, the shift from brick and mortar to online shopping continues. Because “going to another store” in the online world is as easy as a mouse click, retaining customers throughout the shopping and buying process is critical. Does your site have what it takes to give customers a satisfying shopping experience and earn their loyalty?

Between some friends’ regrettably-timed birthdays and the holidays themselves, the past month has provided me ample opportunity to interact with and admire recent advances in online shopping and checkout design. From that admittedly unscientific sample, here are some thoughts on key aspects of the checkout experience to consider, as well as my take on the winners at each step.

Searching and inspecting

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. As your customers’ first encounter with your site, the searching and inspecting experience is critical. Think of your site’s browse and detail pages as a top-notch personal shopper, and design them to mirror the qualities and behaviors of superstars in that role:

• Flexible: Make sure your site supports multiple modes of shopping (such as browsing within broad categories as well as focused searching based on specific criteria), and enables users to easily recover if they click into the wrong item or just want to continue shopping.
• Good listener: Many customers have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for - is your site designed to listen? Filters that expose a wide selection of available criteria, work together, and support multiple values are great ‘listeners’. If you’re not sure what options to provide, monitor the use of your search box to identify filter candidates.
• Efficient: Performance matters, so be sure you’ve tuned your page updates to deliver lightning-fast results.
• Forthcoming: Ensure that your browse pages provide users enough information to quickly disqualify undesired items and develop strong interest in appropriate items, and that detail pages include all information needed to close the sale. While a picture is worth 1,000 words, it can’t say anything if it’s too small - an image size that’s ample for displaying a collection of small items like shoes or belts could induce squinting and frustration when presenting full-length dresses. On browse pages, provide a control for adjusting image size, and include interactive swatches of color options to reduce the need to drill in. On detail pages, provide multiple views and close-ups with minimal navigation.

Winner: Endless

This site rocks my world with a half-dozen filter categories that work in tandem, allow multiple values, can be reset with a single click, and update results in the blink of an eye. Replacing the ‘more colors’ bar with a row of interactive color swatches would earn them an A+.

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Remembering to remember

You are shopping on Amazon. You add something to your cart, and you decide to checkout. Amazon asks you for your account information. "Enter your e-mail address," it says. You do. Underneath that are two radio buttons. One says "I am a new customer." The other says "I am a returning customer," and offers a field for your password. You click, or tab, to the next field and enter your password. You hit enter, or click the sign in button — it makes no difference to Amazon because this is what it replies:

You clicked on the button indicating you're a new customer, but you also provided a password. If you're a new customer, please do not enter a password yet (we'll ask you to create one later). If you're a returning customer, please click on the button indicating that you already have a password, then type in your password.

You are confused and dismayed. You did NOT click on the button indicating you are a new customer! (What button?! The only button in the page says "Sign in!") You realize the default on this login page is set to "new customer." You wonder why it does not understand your intentions. It could see that you have entered a password, yet it did not bother to query the database; or, why did it not simply toggle the radio button as you tabbed or clicked into the password field?

You get the feeling Amazon holds some kind of institutional animosity towards you, like being sent to the back of the line at the DMV because you made a slight error on one of their forms.

But you forget about this, until the next time, and the time after that...

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

A conversation about voice interactions

A while back, several of us in the studio had a little spontaneous discussion about voice user interfaces over email. We thought we'd share some highlights. Please pile on in the comments section.

Steve Calde: What are people’s experiences with voice user interfaces? [A client] is interested in learning more about how to document voice-activated systems, and wondered if we had any experience to share.

Alan Cooper: You could also suggest to them that voice interfaces are inherently bad and will never work very well.

Dave Cronin: Why are they inherently bad?

I agree that they often are bad, but it seems to be more an implementation issue than something intrinsic about voice commands.

Stefan Klocek: The reason they are inherently flawed is that we use our voice for other more important things in addition to the system level input we would like to give to our DVD player. There is no way for the voice interface to understand that the context has changed and that I am no longer giving it a command, rather I am now giving my child a command or am simply muttering to myself. Of course we could imagine a system in which we indicate context by saying “DVD player - pause”, but this is adjusting my input to the deficiencies of the system.

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Tyranny of the majority

I'm a big fan of democracy. I believe that every citizen should have equal access to power, that a community should express its values and priorities through elected officials, and that the outcome of an election is a critical expression of the state of that community.

Still, there are limits to the utility of democracy. You don't ask your friends to vote on the probable cause of your stomachache. Newspapers don't poll their readers when they're deciding what leads to pursue. Our elected officials don't ask us to decide whether a complicated bailout plan is the right course of action for stabilizing our financial system ... (Umm, actually, I take that back).

Makers of the excellent publishing platform Wordpress recently asked their users to vote on certain UI decisions in its next release. They didn't ask users to design the UI from scratch, but they did ask some strategic, fundamental UI questions:

Q.2: The La-Z-Boy goes: (a) to the left of the TV; (b) to the right of the table with the pizza on it; (c) under the reading light; (d) other: [please explain]

Here's a screenshot of the whole survey. The survey authors tried to be helpful by providing rationale for each option, but it sounded a little like the engineers at BMW asking me where I want my steering wheel and what intervals I want on the wiper switch. On one hand, it's a nice gesture; on the other, these questions are fundamental to the user experience of their product. Shouldn't it be the business of BMW to determine the appropriate implementation?

The point is: There ARE right answers to these questions. They are not matters of taste. The key to determining the answers, however, is deeply connected with a long-term strategy for the user experience. Does Wordpress have a long-term strategy for its UI? To use a counter-example: Facebook could have asked its users whether the News Feed was a good feature. (As you may recall, users initially hated it). Facebook kept it, with a slight modification, and it is now the foundation of the tool. That's strategy at work.

On a more philosophical note: When there is expertise in a field, why pretend that there isn't? When Wes Anderson makes a movie, he doesn't revisit the first principles of filmmaking and decide anew whether film editing is really something that an "expert" should be hired to do. He hires an editor because he knows that the editor will bring out the best in the film. I would argue that UI designers have a similar effect on the technology underlying a product. They're able to craft a cohesive whole from the disparate elements. Search is a disparate element that needs a place in the cohesive whole; why ask the community to decide where it fits in the experience?

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Discoverability

Hey iPhone users, did you know that you have access to special diacritical characters? Neither did I. The bloggers at iSmashphone had to point it out to me in their entry 12 iPhone Tricks You Might Not Have Known.

The way you do it is to press and hold the base character, and the line of diacritical characters appears above. Slide your finger to the correct one and lift up, and now you can properly spell the word háček.

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Slanty (and underhanded) Design

I’ve been entranced with the notion of Slanty Design ever since I read Russell Beale’s article about it in Communications of the ACM in 2007. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Slanty Design is kind of anti-affordance, a difficulty-of-use employed to achieve certain design decisions. I think even the acknowledgment of such tools mark a maturity of interaction design: it’s not solely about making things easy to use. (Just, perhaps, mostly?) Unfortunately, the use of slanty design isn’t always to encourage better behavior. Sometimes it’s just greed.

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Countdown to a spanking

XP: Are you SURE you don't want to restart now?

A constant thorn in my side from our use of Windows XP as our primary workstations is the Automatic Updates feature. In explaining my frustration to others, I've inevitably compared it to very similar behavior in Mac OS X, which for some reason does not drive me insane. I've been unable to put my finger on the difference until just this morning. Where OS X also presents a modal (non-closeable) dialog that requires an action, Windows floats that dialog above everything else, forcing the issue. With OS X, I can happily continue about my day, and decide to restart only when it is convenient for me. XP on the other hand, requires a 'Restart Now' or a 'Restart Later' before it gets out of my way, and choosing 'Restart Later' begins a Sisyphean cycle of misery until finally the computer has had enough of your sandbagging and counts down an automatic restart, like a mother counting down the time you have left before you get a spanking.

What a difference being able to click away makes.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Startle wayfinding

Axel Peemoeller’s wayfinding system for the Melbourne Eureka Tower Carpark has been making the internet rounds. Props to him, it’s a novel and eyecatching design. (See below for one example from his site.) But something about it makes me think it’s disorienting (and possibly dangerous) for drivers. Let me try and articulate my amateur cognitive science/interaction design theory to explain.

While driving, your brain’s 3D systems are in high gear. (Pardon the pun.) Your mind is tuned to look for positioning cues such as occlusion, parallax, and especially size changes. This last is most important, as your visual system is on the lookout for anything that suddenly grows larger than the things around it, which would be a clear sign that you’re about to hit something. It’s called the startle response, and it happens within about 80 milliseconds, far too fast for any rational processing to counteract it.

So now, think of yourself in the Eureka Tower Carpark. Turning a corner, you’re a little confounded by the strange and lovely colored shapes on the wall. What’s going on here? All of a sudden, your visual system puts all these shapes together in a way that could only make sense if there was something (in this case, typography) jumping out right in front of you. Your gut reaction should be to slam on the brakes, even if your logical brain can decipher the thing a few milliseconds later. Hopefully the driver behind you left enough room.

So I haven’t been there, and I don’t know if this conjecture bears out in fact, but the pictures certainly set off my startle reaction.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Important visual design principles for interface design

Now that everyone at Cooper has committed to writing a more frequent Journal, I’ve found myself reading a lot more blogs. That’s not to say that I wasn’t happily browsing and sponging before, but I’ve been really consumed by other people’s opinions lately. For instance, Ryan Singer of 37 Signals pointed to an interesting UI discussion just a few weeks ago. The discussion began in the comment area of a screenshot posted to Flickr, and it related to an iPhone application called Triplog/1040 by Stevens Creek Software; I've pasted the photo below.

The screenshot received a great deal of negative criticism. The customer reviews at the iTunes store have been equally negative, and the average rating is currently 1 ½ stars out of 5. (Not great if you’re looking to earn revenue on your application and there are several competitors challenging you).

So what to do about it? Well, I *could* critique the screen with additional constructive thoughts but I feel like Steve, the designer, has received enough suggestions and probably is not looking for more feedback. (If my work had received that kind of attention I think I might quit and become a barista). Instead, I’ll highlight a few visual design principles that this conversation sparked in my mind.

First impressions count
Just like you gain an instant impression when you meet a person for the first time, the same is true for interfaces. Called the Aesthetic-Usability Effect in Universal Principles of Design, this principle highlights the important role that visual design plays when designing products:

The Aesthetic-Usability Effect describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs — whether they are or not ... Aesthetic designs are more effective at fostering positive attitudes than unaesthetic designs, and make people more tolerant of design problems.

The discussion about the Triplog software has been all about how unusable it looks despite the application not being available at the time to use. That’s not to say there aren’t usability flaws but a visual design with more organization and the right prioritization would go a long way to improving the perceived usability of the application.

Dense doesn’t have to be ugly but it does require you to be smarter
Much criticism of the Triplog interface was about the screen being too cluttered. But as Steve pointed out, his users need to view all of that information at the same time. I'm not challenging whether information should be removed but am reminded that for screens with high information density it is more important to use visual design techniques to organize the structure and flow of content as well as prioritize the most important information in a way that’s easily scannable.

Looking at a dense interface is like listening in a restaurant. When the restaurant is quiet it’s easy to hear the person you’re dining with but if the restaurant is busy and there’s a lot of background noise then it takes a lot more effort to hear and understand what the person sitting opposite is saying. You can do it but it takes a lot more work and isn’t as much fun.

Dense interfaces should have a clear visual hierarchy with a maximum four or five levels of distinction. Dense screens should be designed so that similar interface elements share attributes such as size, shape and color or proximity. Dense information should be organized so that elements are aligned to an underlying grid, which aids scanning. Finally, dense screens should contain minimal gratuitous noise that doesn’t support the user interaction.

Be different if you want to be remembered
Several people offered constructive ideas in the discussion. Some even went as far as to quickly mock up how they would design the interface (see here and here). Some resulted in screen designs that looked very similar to Apple’s UI guidelines for the iPhone.

I recognize that these mock-ups were done extremely quickly, but the alternatives run the risk of being too generic to be memorable, looking too much like an iPhone utility and not enough like a unique, useful, and original application. I’m the first to recommend standard UI best practices, but standards need not get in the way of establishing a brand. (Some commenters even preferred the bright blue background in Steve’s design to the more familiar iPhone UI, perhaps because it is unique and memorable).

It’s an exciting time to be in visual interface design
Okay, this may not be a principle, but it’s worth mentioning. There are all kinds of new digital products with interfaces that are changing the world we live in, and it’s exciting to see, discuss, and participate in this movement. Apple’s iPhone is one great example. New technologies require new thoughtful design. Now I just need to figure out what iPhone app I’m going to design and sell on iTunes.

What do you think? Join the conversation in Comments

Well-Designed Products

A common affliction plaguing many of us interaction designers is the propensity to complain and kvetch about every piece of software on our computers, cell-phones and cars. And it's true—there is a lot of bad software out there.

To offset this sometimes irritating tendency to critique and redesign everything we see, I'd like to offer a selection of software that I consider to be truly well-designed. To avoid creating a list that is simply an expression of my personal taste (which of course it is, to some extent), I devised some criteria as necessary aspects of a well-designed software product.

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Critic to Creator: Recognizing Good Design

Someone always asks the question, and I am never ready for it.

"So, what products out there are well-designed?"

As an interaction designer, I learn about users and design a product that helps them meet their goals—one that is tailored to the way they work. Yet this question can still stump me. I am not alone: all too often, people in our field focus so much on pointing out the egregious interaction design mistakes that make it to market, we forget to pay attention to the good design that exists. Not only does it make our profession look bad if we are always complaining, but it also makes us less effective. How can we create good products if we can only articulate what “bad” is?

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Do U SMS? Text Messaging is Not the Hassle it Once Was

Few modes of communication burden the user with as much interaction hassle as text messaging on mobile phones. Without help from word-prediction assistants, the word "Hello" requires 13 button-presses, not including an additional 5 to get from the start screen to the messaging app. Nevertheless, the clear benefits of short text message services (SMS) have lured untold millions into uncomfortable, not to say unsatisfying, partnerships with their mobile phones.

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Notable Product: How Nokia´s 8290 Does Something Right

Most people buy mobile phones because they want to be able to make phone calls anywhere, anytime. All the other stuff that's crammed into phones—calculators, game players, text-messaging capability—represents incomplete solutions for problems that are better served by devices dedicated to those needs. If I want to play a game on the go, I won't buy a Nokia 8290.

Still, phones offer a lot of sophisticated functionality to support specific mobile phone needs. Users need a way to quickly change ring-tones, ring volume, and message alert tones—so phone manufacturers allow you to tweak these so that one's phone can behave appropriately as one moves from the construction site to the movie theater.

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Learning From the Mistakes of Internet Banks

Retail banks are realizing that Internet banking is not living up to the hype that surrounded it a few years ago. At that time, analysts predicted that demand would follow the trends in general Internet usage and grow to hundreds of millions of users by the middle of this decade. Some brave entrepreneurs were even betting that the age of the branch-based deposit institution was over, and that upstart "Internet-only" banks would be able to capitalize on hot new technology to steal all the customers. Yet adoption rates are low, and customer interest is flagging. Why? Online banking is a good example of how bricks-and-mortar institutions can stumble when they try to solve new economy problems with old world approaches.

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What We Can Learn From the Fender Stratocaster

I must admit I'm not terribly impressed by the quality of today's software—my benchmark for good product design isn't defined by the output of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or other respected software companies. Those companies produce some good work, of course, but the software industry, though no longer in its infancy, still seems to be working through its gawky adolescent stage. So, when I think about high quality products, I think of BMW automobiles, Eames furniture, and the Fender Stratocaster guitar.

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Beating the Checkout Blues

Your online store is a good example of the breed. You've got good products at good prices, the site navigation is straightforward, the product information is rich, appropriate, and easy to find, and everyone likes the clean, uncluttered visual design of the site. So why do more than half of your customers abandon their full shopping carts?

Depending on which research report you read, roughly 25% to 75% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before consummating the deal. Despite the disparity in numbers, all the research firms agree on one thing: that's way too many.

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Time Travel Design

In this month's newsletter, Tony refers to a Washington Post story titled The End-User View of Techo-Nirvana: Blink, Blink, Blink. The Washington Post writer had this to say about Video Cassette Recorders:

That flashing "12:00" has become a symbol of technology as tyranny, taunt, impotence, ignorance, intimidation, humiliation, stone in the shoe and pain in the butt. It stands for innovation created without humans in mind. Yet humans have grown to live with it. To expect it. To adjust themselves to the selfishness of these machines. Like sheep.

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