The Official Fluid Blog

Parametric Navigation…it’s really just a fancy industry phrase for a filtered search, or parameters you can select to filter down results sets. So if I go to widgets.com and search for a widget, the site would present me with options to narrow my widget selection by price or rating or size or color, etc. The overall idea is that I can pick the individual attributes that appeal to me, and come up with a customized list of widgets that meet my specific needs. It’s my preferred search method, so I figured I’d tell you what I think works, and what falls flat.

I started with the list of Internet Retailers 2009 Hot 100 Retail Web Sites. I don’t quite understand how they came up with this list, given that some of these sites look like they haven’t been redesigned since the ’90s, but it seemed like a good baseline to use for my research.

(more…)

My initial goal was to research and write a blog on sneakers, the sneaker culture, and what drives a ‘sneakerhead’ to seek the most limited/hard to get/wait-in-line-for-2 days type sneakers. But as I set out on my task to contribute to the Fluid blog, I stumbled onto the site miadidas.com. I say ‘stumbled’ because I have not heard or seen much about this site. I knew about NikeID, YourReebok(formerly known as RBKCustom), and the newly updated Vans Custom site among others, but was surprised and somewhat disappointed about just discovering the custom site for Adidas shoes. I’ve seen the in-store experience at the Adidas store in San Francisco, but was not aware it was migrated to the web – or at least a version of it.

With that said, I decided to focus my attention to the site and give my personal review. (more…)

The other night I let my son configure a pair of Vans slip-ons for his 6th birthday. Watching him and his 3 year old brother navigate the process was informative. Two key things I observed:

• My son moused-over every single option for every single product part (not kdding…he methodically moused over every option). This was only possible because Fluid Configure uses client-side technology (Adobe Flex in this case) to do the image previewing, meaning you don’t need a round trip to the server to generate the image.  Using server-side imaging technology this could take an hour or more.
• My 3 year old son asked, “Can we turn it over?” Specifically, even as an observer to the process he wanted to view the product from multiple perspectives. While Vans doesn’t feature the incredible rotation of Your Reebok, but it does show the product from multiple views with great responsiveness.

Overall it was gratifying to see them  quickly grasp the experience, move through the configuration process and take great pleasure from the emails and SMS’s they were able to send letting their family know about the shoes they had just designed. If only the design of their shoes could have been so positive.

Synergy, forethought, planning, and commitment are commonplace words thrown around in the sales cycle for agencies pitching products and services the world over, industry-wide. Fortunately, these buzz words are not isolated to direct revenue-generating activities.

Team building can be traced back to the late 1920s when researchers conducted studies and observed worker productivity in a mid-West industrial facility outside Chicago called Hawthorne Works. Behaviorists studied groups of industrial workers in various conditions and determined that the most compelling evidence was observed in the building of a sense of group identity, a feeling of social support and cohesion that came with increased worker interaction. The study also demonstrated that workers had a tendency to perform at higher productivity at work-related tasks, most notably after performing non-work-related tasks.  Shortly thereafter, the onset of company sponsored team building activities was born.

(more…)