The Official Fluid Blog

This is the second in a series of posts based on my presentation (”Can I get that in pink and eggplant?”) about the future of customer experience online at the Web Experience Forum in Boston on 14 October 2008.

Mass Customization and Manufacture-on-Demand

Customized products are the ultimate in personalization: customers can select from many options for many attributes to create a product that is unique. This level of customization is made possible my manufacture-on-demand processes. Finished products are not stored in inventory to be picked, packed, and shipped – they are actually manufactured when the order is received.

A potential hazard of customization is that it creates more choice, possibly too much choice, for the consumer. Much has been studied and written about the paradox of choice and decision paralysis, but it boils to situations where there are so many options from which to choose that the consumer is overwhelmed, and it is actually easier to make no choice (and abort the purchase) than to make any choice. When customers are presented with many customizable components, each with many configurable options, the number of combinations may be overwhelming. Therefore we need to design customer experiences that help customers get started, make decisions, support their choices, and encourage them to proceed and complete the process.

One way we can craft more inviting experiences is to manage the number of choices people are given and how they are presented. A manufacture-on-demand process does not need to be transparent to the customer – they do not need to know when products are stocked in inventory versus made when an order is placed.

At the discreet end of the continuum, customers never even know that they are ordering a custom product, because the merchant has pre-defined all of the options and choices (e.g., notebook color, binding, and cover image) and presents the product as a ready-made item. Even though the customer makes no choices beyond selecting a quantity, when the order is placed that product is manufactured.

At the limited level of the customization continuum, consumers realize that they are ordering a customized product, but they may not realize the extent to which that product may actually be customized, because the merchant has pre-defined some some of the options (e.g., ink color and envelope interior pattern) but left a few for the customer to specify (e.g., text on the notecard and the font.) The product is still manufactured when the order is placed, but the number of choices has been controlled to make the personalization process simpler and faster.

Finally, at the level of full customization, consumers realize they are are ordering a customized product, and they understand that it will be manufactured just for them when the order is placed. (Curiously, some customers still think that all variations on custom products have been manufactured in advance and stored in a warehouse awaiting selection and shipment when an order is placed, because they may not fully realize the number of combinations possible and that it would not be feasible to make every possible version of a product.) The choices and options are numerous, and the messaging about the product and customization service typically makes it clear that a product is being made just for the consumer according to their specifications.

There are web sites already offering mass customization of products, and we are likely to see more and more as the ability to manufacture-on-demand becomes more widespread. Today, manufacturing-on-demand is often limited to a base set of products (e.g., photo mugs and mousepads) to which a custom pattern, color, or text may be applied, or to products that have manufacturing processes that lend themselves more easily to mass customization (e.g., custom shoes.)

Cafe Press and Zazzle both offer a set of base products from which to begin. Customers then add their own personal touches and select from a few options to create products that are uniquely their own and which are manufactured-on-demand.

Reebok offers full-customization of shoes, and consumers have the ability to design their own shoe selecting from so many choices that there are literally trillions of possible combinations. A unique product is actually possible, and there is no way that Reebok could manufacture and stock all possible variations of the shoes – this is made possible only my manufacture-on-demand processes.

The manufacture-on-demand process and the ability to create custom products also quickly and easily opens up the opportunity for online, digital equivalent of “pop-up stores.” Pop-up stores are temporary physical retail stores that open for a short time in a previously empty location, generate buzz and attention, respond to a trend or community need, sell for a limited time, then close and disappear. Companies that have the ability to manufacture-on-demand could respond quickly to current trends, fads, and styles by pre-defining products, opening a temporary web site, and selling those products either under their brand or as an ephemeral brand. They could offer limited edition products, different products for different geographics regions, or even products that are offered only to existing customers. Once the ephemeral brand has run its course, the web site disappears.

Custom products are more than just choice for the consumer, they are also opportunities for the companies that are able to manufacture-on-demand, who want to differentiate their product offering, and who are able to quickly and nimbly respond to styles, fads, and market trends.

As consumers tuck away their wallets and retailers feel the budget squeeze (despite the fact that online sales continue to rise) Fluid has put together a set of consulting offerings designed to deliver tangible and immediate ROI on a limited budget.

These packages range from $25,000 – $45,000 and are designed to let our clients tap into our expertise in ecommerce customer experience without breaking the bank.

The four initial offerings include:

• A high level expert review of your online store, delivering a prioritized list of areas for immediate improvement including key dropout points in the conversion cycle.
• Targeted analysis of your product detail page and identification of key areas for improvement. Final deliverables include analysis of current page, redesigned schematics and a few visual design directions.
• Checkout flow analysis, investigating the process from cart to transaction and including detailed suggestions from wireframes to visual design.
• Web 2.0 interactive merchandising audit that identifies crucial areas for customer interaction and ways in which rich media can engage shoppers and move them toward a conversion. This solution includes design direction as well as creation of functional, production-ready interactive merchandising components.

We are excited to offer solutions that are specifically designed to meet the needs of the current challenging environment. Thus far, we have had a strong response from retailers looking to use these packages to learn from this year’s holiday season and implement a more effective site in early 2009.

This is the first in a series of posts based on my presentation (”Can I get that in pink and eggplant?”) about the future of customer experience online at the Web Experience Forum in Boston on 14 October 2008.

Video is the next JPEG

Just as static images are seamlessly incorporated into web pages today, we are going to see more seamless integration of video that moves beyond the use of an inline video player. Video will become integral to the content and not be a separate piece of content meant for independent interaction.

In the Harry Potter films, the Daily Prophet newspaper has “magic moving pictures” printed on the page as part of the news article. There is no separate video page and no video player off to the side – the moving pictures are simply integrated into the content of the page.

The Ralph Lauren site Rugby.com integrates video into the page content in a similar manner: the video, the images, and the text all live in the same space as part of a single experience. The brand experience is enhanced and strengthened by using simple yet high-quality video to supplement the information.

Video has the benefit of being able to convey more information than a static image. Seeing clothing on a walking, moving, breathing person tell us much more about fit and finish than a still image on a white background.  We can understand much better how a product might, work, or behave by seeing it in action.

At Martin & Osa the models take turns moving, walking, and turning around to demonstrate how the clothing fits. There is a great nuance to the customer experience: when you select a filter to narrow down your selection, the models wearing clothes that do not match the filter literally walk off the screen. Video is being used not only to show products, but to verify and acknowledge customer interactions.

Video can also tell a story much better than a single image. Would you rather watch a short film or view a single frame from a short film? And the story does not need to focus on the product – it may be used to enhance the brand, to inspire people, and even to set a mood.

The North Face uses video in several ways: demonstrate products in use, educate about the professionals who use the products, show the environments and usages for which the products were developed, and show how the company supports athletes, indigenous peoples, and environmental causes.

And of course video can be used to facilitate shopping, but rather than showing models wearing clothes or salespeople demonstrating products, we can also shop from the same video we see on television and in the movies.

“Shopisodes” take video from popular television programs and provide images, details, and links to buy the products that appear in the video. You can buy the clothes and accessories worn by favorite actors, furniture and decorations from their homes and rooms, and even the items they are using. Each video segment is created to provide information and a link when that product is visible.

Video for product merchandising falls into two categories:

• “Fast” video is meant to be watched like a short film; it provides context and information, and it demonstrates products in use; “fast” video is not clickable, and it is more likely a passive, entertaining experience.
• “Slow” video is meant to provide information while remaining clickable; it focuses on the products and provides ample opportunity to interact with the video while it plays.

Video may also come in a range of quality levels. Low fidelity video has an amateur appearance, may be customer-generated (although professionally produced video may intentionally take on this style), and generally focuses on product information and usage rather than brand enhancement (e.g., product reviews submitted by real customers.) High fidelity video has a professional appearance and may convey a much wider range of information, from product usage to brand ideals to corporate social responsibility.

Although video is becoming increasingly important to the online experience, it is not yet ubiquitous, and there are some issues to be resolved. Video requires much more bandwidth, and although more and more people have broadband access, web pages with integrated video still have longer load times, so visitors wait for content. Additionally, there are still many video formats. Even though Flash Video is perhaps the most common format for inline video today, there are competing formats that offer higher quality video and audio but with a different customer experience, and there are differences across browsers and operating systems that mean that some formats may not be viewable to all visitors.

Nevertheless, the movement toward integrated video is certainly underway, and we are seeing more video being used to provide information and content in more places than ever before. Although we cannot yet walk to the corner and buy a copy of the Daily Prophet, it may not be long before we commonly have similar experiences when browsing the web.

Yesterday Fluid announced Fluid Lite, which we believe is a significant step forward in the capabilities small and mid-sized ecommerce retailers are able to offer on their site. In short, this release means retailers that cannot afford or do not need the full interactive shopping capabilities of Fluid Experience can offer simple zoom, rotation/multiple views and color change on their site at an appropriate price point.

Initially we have launched Fluid Lite for the Yahoo! Stores platform through our partner Fast Pivot (www.fastpivotsoftware.com). For $200/month users can add the same rich zoom functionality that has been proven to increase conversion by 15-50%. Better, this is offered from a self-service site with virtually no need for implementation services (though the folks at Fast Pivot will do a great job helping you out, if you’d like). Even better, the integration with the Yahoo product catalog is built in, so you don’t have to do redundant data entry in Fluid Lite. There is almost no additional work.

The results from the first customer, Automoblox, have been tremendous. They have moved from a site with small, static images to utilize large, interactive images that really showcase their unique product. And ultimately, shopping is about engaging people with your products. We’ll share increase in conversion data with you once we’ve had enough traffic.

One of the most important aspects of the Fluid Lite offering is the deep integration with the ecommerce platform users get out of the box. The Yahoo Stores integration can automatically import product data so you don’t have any manual work. As we complete other integrations, Fluid will be working with partners to roll out Fluid Lite self-service solutions for other SMB ecommerce platforms, including Netsuite Commerce, Amazon Webstores and others. For customers that are already using those platforms we are able to help you now – it is simply the self-service piece and default integration we are working to put in place.

While we think Fluid Lite is an exciting alternative to overpriced imaging solutions on the market today, Fluid still offers Fluid Experience for customers that want to use interactive technology to increase conversion broadly across their site, from site arrival to conversion. Beyond the basic zoom and swatching solutions, Fluid Experience offers video, recently viewed items, suggestive selling and shoppable lifestyle photography.

We’ve been using Fireworks CS3 for wireframing and prototyping since May 2007, and it has been an important tool in our overall design process. As interactions on web sites become more complex, we need stronger tools to help us design, demonstrate, and test those designs.

Adobe recently announced upcoming release of their new CS4 design software, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Fireworks CS4 beta team for the past year and one-half to help test and refine the new version. As part of their release of the new tools, I recorded a series of tutorial videos for Adobe demonstrating how to use the new Fireworks CS4 to create effective wireframes and interactive prototypes more efficiently than ever before:

Using Fireworks for Information and Interaction Design

Creating Interactive Prototypes with Fireworks

Rapid Prototyping with Fireworks

Fireworks As Part of the Complete Design Process

Each video runs about 10 minutes and covers a different set features of Fireworks CS4 for information and interaction design.

Some of the new features in Fireworks CS4 we’re looking forward to:

• Export directly to PDF and support for interactive PDFs
• Enhanced grids and guides for accurate layout
• Enhanced rich symbols that support CSS / HTML export
• Enhanced styles and live previews
• Improved page, layer, and state functionality
• Improved workflow between Fireworks and Photoshop

These updated tools will help us create better design documents and more interactive demonstrations and prototypes for our clients, and they support the increasing importance of complex interaction design in the visitor experience.

Two and one-half years ago Fluid began a design project for Charles Schwab to craft a whole new web experience and look-and-feel for their customer account management portal. The design project coincided with a significant effort on Schwab’s part to update, enhance, and extend the entire back-end system responsible for account data, security, transactions, and content management, so the new site had to accomplish a few key goals:

• Create an experience that inspires trust, confidence, and credibility in all customers.
• Provide quick and easy access to consolidated account data and all transactional functions.
• Offer improved and new functionality without displacing or deprecating existing functionality customers had come to expect and rely upon.
• Modernize the site’s design to leverage new interaction patterns to provide access to deeper content without overwhelming or alienating customers.
• Consolidate the site’s research data and information into a more logically organized structure to improve findability and usability.
• Integrate the many marketing and awareness campaigns into a single, rule-guided system for presentation within the account management center.
• Extend the brand guidelines from the print, broadcast, and online marketing to the customer account center while crafting a reliable, efficient, and focused customer experience.

Schwab’s previous site (which is still available during this transition period) has been serving their customers for more than six years. During that time browser technology and customer expectations have changed, the site (like all web sites) grew organically to accommodate changing business needs, and the customer experience become fragmented and occasionally unfocused. Fluid was charged with helping Schwab craft a new, unified vision for the customer experience and then defining a design system that would essentially be everything to everyone, because in the world of finance the margin of error is zero. Mistakes in the customer experience cause customers to doubt the reliability of a system, and when that system is responsible for their money customers have no tolerance for mistakes.

The design process lasted ten months, starting with six weeks of stakeholder interviews and customer research. We crafted wireframes for hundreds of distinct pages and screens for six months, and during this time we went into the usability labs with click-through prototypes for eight rounds of testing with actual customers. Any feature or function that did not test well would be re-designed and tested again – only when an interaction was successful in two consecutive rounds of testing would it be removed from the task list and marked as “validated.” At the same time we were crafting and testing prototypes, we were also working closely with the internal brand group to establish a look-and-feel for the entire customer account management center, and in the last three rounds of testing we presented prototypes that incorporated the updated visual design, because the way a web site looks can actually have an effect on usability.

When all of the core and essential functionality and the new look-and-feel had been tested and validated, we moved into a refinement phase to extend the design to the remainder of the account management center. The project culminated in the delivery of a pair of extensive style guides that defined the design system and patterns for the interaction, information, and visual design.

Now, more than one and one-half years since the end of the design phase, the new Schwab Customer Account Center is being rolled out to all customers.  How well has the design been implemented, and how well does it hold up? I’m happy to say that it has been implemented very well – the design and experience are true to the vision and to what was tested so successfully with so many real customers.  Compare for yourself:

The previous Schwab Customer Account Center:

The new and improved Schwab Customer Account Center:

The new design increases content density, the organizational structure is actually flatter and makes it easier to find information, functionality has been made more efficient, and the entire experience from account data to transactions to market research is now consistent and on-brand.

Congratulations to everyone at Charles Schwab who had a vision for excellent customer experience and service, who demanded exacting standards, and who maintained focus while seeing this project come to fruition! Fluid is proud to have been a partner in this effort and in your continued success.

I will be presenting at the Web Experience Forum in Boston on October 14 and discussing the future of online customer experience in a session titled “Can I Get That in Pink and Eggplant?”  Here’s the blurb for the session:

“As more and more retail purchases occur on the Web, the ability to portray products as if they were in the buyers’ hands will become one of the key drivers of an excellent Web experience. Color change, product configuration, magnification, rotation, and personalization are already mainstream features expected by and familiar to consumers. What will online customers want next, and what do they not even realize we can offer? What is the next level of Web experience we need to attain to drive growth in Web transactions? This presentation will look at how emerging technologies and innovative design will transform the Web experience in the coming years.”

I don’t want to give everything away before the session (and I don’t think the folks at the Web Experience Forum would appreciate it), but here are some hints about what we see in the next two to five years:

• Video is the next JPEG,
• Sites will be smarter and more aware of who we are and what we like,
• Mass customization of products, whether or not we realize it,
• Sites will relinquish total control of the experience and become deconstructed,
• Mobile devices will be links and keys in much larger experiences,
• Social, social, social!

Check back the week of October 20 for start of six installments summarizing each of these future directions in online customer experience.

Many of the multi-channel merchants we work with have invested in beautiful photography that shows a range of products in highly branded settings. Many of these photos are shot primarily for print catalogs and, up to now, retailers haven’t been able to put these assets to affective use on the web.

In some cases, catalogers have uploaded versions of their print catalog to the web. While there are legitimate reasons to do this, Fluid’s customers have generally found results from these efforts disappointing. Conversion rates are low, as you would expect from directly translating a print layout to the web. Even with the fancy page flipping affect many of them add .

In other instances retailers have simply taken the existing photo assets and overlaid merchandising text in Photoshop. While this serves the purpose, this text frequently looks cluttered and may significantly lessen the brand impact of the photo. These photos were taken to create an emotional connection between the shopper and a brand or product. Reading text overlays certainly lessens the visual impact and can also distract from the emotional connection of envisioning yourself in the scene.
Other retailers have used these assets as the basis for a richer shopping experience, creating tooltips that appear on mouse over. This is a great use of interactive technology but up to now has been resource intensive to produce. The manual production required to update a banner has required a designer to create the visual and an engineer to wire up the custom Flash or AJAX technology. By the time the banner is integrated into the site it could be a week or more later.

The Fluid Retail team has recently released an enhancement to Fluid Experience that allows retailers to more efficiently use rich brand photography on their site. Using our authoring tools virtually any member of the production team can pull in existing photography, mask out and associate products and publish the assets to the site without need of any technical skills. The whole process can be completed in a matter of minutes.

I’ve embedded an example of the type of interactivity that is possible with Fluid Experience below. Note that shoppers are able to learn about all the products shown, without leaving the photography that has engaged them. Combined with a quick shop window and mini-cart, this type of interactivity encourages the purchase of multiple products.

It is also worth noting that this merchandising component is embedded using Fluid Social’s content syndication capabilities, that allow anyone to take your site content to iGoogle, blogs, MySpace or Facebook.

As I said earlier, the real magic behind the Fluid technology is the authoring tool that eliminates the need to have Flash developers or IT involved in publishing new assets to the site. If you are looking for better ways to engage shoppers with rich product photography you should contact us to learn more.

Not too long ago I panned American Airlines for trying to cover their business’ shortcomings by charging for every checked bag. In the spirit of Ying and Yang and balance in the universe I wanted to write about an equally great ecommerce experience I had with Zappos.com.

I ordered two pairs of shoes from their site. First, they upgraded the shipping on my order for free. That was nice. Not terribly exciting but a nice thing.

More impressively, they took what could have been a negative experience and turned it into a positive. One pair of shoes I ordered turned out to, “…not pass our quality inspection and we do not have a replacement available in stock in the size and color you requested.” This was very disappointing and could have reflected badly on their brand, making me less likely to shop there in the future.

But as I kept reading I was amazed. Not only did they include a link to another retailer that had the product in stock (JC Penny in this case) but they included a link that took me directly to the product on their site! Tremendous!They knew what I wanted, that they could not help me, so they provided me a valuable service.
Not only did it turn my perception of the Zappos.com brand more positive, it virtually guaranteed that I would start there the next time I shop for dress shoes.

At Fluid we’re thrilled that Reebok recently utilized our products as an important part of their site relaunch. Although we didn’t do the redesign (it was done by Carat/Molecular), the site shows off some of the great capabilities of our products including the ability to add our interactive technology directly into an all Flash site.

Perhaps more exciting than how the products were implemented into the design is the milestone this represents for us at Fluid. Having top tier agencies like Carat and Molecular utilizing our product technology is a symbol of the exciting growth we’ve seen from a well respected boutique agency to industry leaders in customer experience for online retail.

In developing our products we were confident technology providers such as ecommerce platforms and product search providers would be happy to partner with us. But we had serious concerns (and more than a few heated debates) whether other agencies would be comfortable implementing products whose genesis was largely out of a competitor. These concerns forced us to be incredibly disciplined in developing our products. In every instance we have created a product that is open, easy to implement and completely customizable by our customers and their agencies. And most importantly we wanted to build a product in the truest sense, where our customers and partner agencies can be completely self-sufficient, with no need to involve Fluid in the product implementation (unless our help was desired).

With the launch of Reebok.com, built by world leading agencies using Fluid’s products, we are entering a new era for our products. We welcome any agency to use our products to offer their clients a richer experience they can maintain without any Flash expertise. We expect this will help other agencies build the same sort of engaging experiences Fluid creates for its customers faster and more cost effectively. Contact us to learn how your agency can start using our products today.