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Born this morning. Yes, they are a prolific bunch.

Here’s your daily dose of cute.

In the midsts of a debate as to whether HTML5 will make Flash redundant, Adobe is releasing an update to the plug-in on Mac OS X that is expected to "get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering." You can get the beta on the Adobe Labs site.

With major players like YouTube trialing HTML5 versions of their sites Adobe has to keep an eye on Flash's performance which is often blamed for crashing browsers and high CPU loads. While HTML5 video playback definitely has performance benefits Flash still has some advantages over it such as fullscreen playback, but for how long?

Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch said, "With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video." Via CNet.

I just noticed that YouTube has yet again updated it's video player. And to my surprise, this time it realy works and looks great!

All the icons are in the right places, plus they all make sense visualy.

Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTlm6dU2xHk

If you were to draft a profile for a UX thought leader, you'd likely come up with something that closely resembled Kim Lenox. Known for resetting the perimeters of everyday problem solving, Kim has devoted her career to making life—if not the world—better through user experience design.

Fresh from a three-week European speaking tour, Kim spent an hour on the phone with Tim Wood of EffectiveUI. They spoke about one of Kim's passions: the art, science and philosophy of mobile UX design.

Wood: Before we jump into the interview, can you tell our readers about your professional background and what your role is at Adaptive Path?

Lenox: I am a senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path, one of the design leads. Basically, I will take a project from the very first sales call all the way through to completing the product. I will have the conversations with the clients and figure out what their objectives are and build out a proposal that's appropriate, and then take it all the way through to designing the product. If there's research involved, I'll probably do the research as well.

At Adaptive Path, we have design leads and we also have practitioners. I'm actually both; I will lead a project, but I will also be a practitioner on a project under someone else's lead. We flip those roles so we have more than a few individuals who lead projects. We all generally get to lead projects. It makes it easier (and actually more enjoyable) to have the opportunity to lead something and also have a chance to be a design resource or a research resource. That enables me, for example, to focus on the design problem more than client relations at times.

Before Adaptive Path, I worked at Samsung Electronics at one of their six global design centers in San Francisco (which recently moved and merged with Samsung's Los Angeles Lab). At Samsung, I was part of a team of interaction designers, industrial designers, and design researches all sitting in the same room working together on projects, primarily for the North American market, but also for the global market.

We did advanced concepts for the most part, things that were three to five, maybe even 10 years out. I did a lot of research and a lot of interaction design work there. In everything I do, it's a collaborative process working within project teams. Prior to Samsung, I was working at LeapFrog and prior to that I was working in interactive television. I've basically been doing software design and development and project management for the last 13 or 14 years.

Wood: Our discussion today about designing exceptional mobile experiences begs the question: What does "mobile" mean to you? Does your perspective extend beyond the classic telecom context, especially given some of the market trends today and the direction consumer electronics is taking?

Lenox: Yes, mobile to me definitely extends well beyond the feature of communicating by phone. When I think about mobile, I think about how we take our content and our lives with us through a mobile device, which might be a PDA or a Palm Pilot-type of phone. It might be our MP3 players, or an iPod with video. The essence is that we're bringing our stuff with us into a mobile setting, which is quite different from just having a mobile phone for communicating. It's now about moving our stuff around with us.

Wood: Given that mobile devices have enabled new behaviors—like being able to bring all our content with us all the time—what are some of the common challenges you face when designing for mobile devices? With all the constraints that small-scale interfaces present, especially around things that you are able to hold in your hand, put in your pocket or take with you in your car, what are the challenges?

Lenox: I think that the biggest challenge we face within the mobile industry is that a lot of the time our clients and our partners are thinking about features and technology first rather than what the users' needs are within a mobile context.

At Adaptive Path, we help our clients understand that while they have built cool technology, or while they enabled great features, we need to actually find out whether the user is going to want them. And if users do want them, how will they actually use those features?

We take a step back. Instead of looking at features and technology, we look at users' motivations and behaviors in the mobile context to better understand what the needs are. What are the opportunities, what are the gaps that current products are not fulfilling? From there, we can unearth some new opportunities that might be found within the mobile context.

Wood: How do you educate or sell your clients on moving more towards a user-centered model to answer those types of questions?

Lenox: Often clients come to us with a design problem and say, "We need an interface designed for this feature." If they come to us, they're not coming to have somebody just implement a user interface. That's not why you come to Adaptive Path. We really engage the client in the process of understanding their user. We will talk to them and ask: Is this the appropriate feature? Is this the appropriate way you want to approach it? If they're willing to work with us, we take them along the process of educating them about the consumer.

We often do ethnographic research to help us understand the specific problem at hand, but also to help the client understand who their users are and what their users' needs are. We have various research techniques. We pick and choose the techniques that are appropriate for the challenge we're facing.

One of the first projects I worked on when I started at Adaptive Path (Rachel Hinman and Dan Saffer were co-leading the project), we did a deprivation study. The project was for mobile Internet usage before the iPhone came out and mobile Internet usage wasn't commonplace (and it still isn't). In order to find out how people would be using it, we deprived them of their PC Internet usage, gave them a mobile phone, and told them it was their only access to the Internet for several days. That unearthed all kinds of fabulous data about the problems with mobile Internet usage that informed us on how we would actually build a better experience.

Wood: Interesting. Can you talk about the aspects of mobile UX design that you find frustrating?

Lenox: You know, I don't find designing for mobile frustrating at all. I find that we have amazing opportunities right now. There are so many unknowns to tackle that, to me, the field is a playground of opportunities. I don't find anything necessarily frustrating about what I do. It's exciting.

I guess if there's anything, it's that I don't have enough time to do all the fun things that I want to do and there's not enough time to do all the cool research that's possible. There's not enough time to actually design all the features and experiences that I want to do.

The technology is there. Users are much more savvy than they were ten years ago, and they expect a lot more. We have the tools now to actually do amazing things. I think what's inhibiting a lot of innovation right now is the model of having users pay for certain services per usage. It's a limitation on what's currently available in the marketplace simply because the carriers (or operators) and the manufacturers—the players—don't quite understand what the users' needs are and what the possibilities might be.

Instead, they're thinking about the traditional approach where people pay to use this wireless pipe. They're not thinking about the products in a way where we could actually enable useful experiences. If I'm standing in front of a restaurant, I should be able to automatically get access to the reviews of that restaurant from all of my social networks. Why can't we have the technology for that? Or rather, why haven't we enabled that yet? Because the parties haven't figured out the business model that will make money appropriately.

Wood: Is that true for just North America or do you find that's the case in Europe and Japan as well?

Lenox: I think that overall in Asia and in Europe, they're definitely more experimental and they're definitely moving forward a lot more quickly than North America. The hardware available in Asia and in Europe is several years ahead of what we have in North America, so that's a concern.

I'm not quite sure why North America is lagging behind. The knee-jerk reaction in the mobile industry is to always blame the carriers. I don't want to just blame the carriers—we have clients that are mobile manufacturers as well as carriers, and I always find it amazing that the people we work with really understand and can envision where the industry can go and what the possibilities are. But they're limited within their own companies to make real change happen.

Our job as designers is not just to design cool stuff, but also to actually educate at the executive level about the value of our designs and the business benefits of the work we're doing. We're no longer solely responsible for designing the interface or designing the experience. We also have to explain why and how that experience can actually make money and why that experience is worth pursuing.

Wood: Absolutely. I agree with you 100 percent. With respect to the possibilities and potential that is emerging in the marketplace given all the new technologies, what do you think are the key advantages that the mobile platform can offer in terms of user experience, and how is that platform best exploited?

Lenox: Like I said, we've barely scratched the surface on the possibilities. We, as an industry, need to take more time in understanding what the human behavior is and how we can best create beneficial experiences for the consumer.

So it's a different ballgame basically dealing with mobile context because you can't just simply ask somebody what they want. In any user experience design, you can't just ask the user what they want. A well-used story to make this point is if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted before the car was created, they would have said they wanted a faster horse.

Users can't always envision the future the way designers and engineers can. It's our collective responsibility to observe behaviors and realize that a faster horse isn't going to happen. As designers, we need to find those gaps and unmet needs that users don't even know exist.

Wood: So true. Do you think the same approach holds true for other interactive services and experiences beyond the mobile platform, especially now that just about everything's connected in a ubiquitous computing environment with rich Internet applications (RIAs) hyperlinked to other parts of site, and cloudware and software as service?

Lenox: Absolutely. There are so many possibilities that we could be doing right now. Anybody working in software development needs to set aside a certain amount of budget towards just simple R&D—allowing a few of their designers and engineers to get together and think outside the box, think beyond this quarter, next quarter, next year, and really envision what the possibilities are.

Many of our clients have R&D centers that work on future possibilities, mostly around technology. But I really think that there needs to be dedicated resources to behavioral research on possibilities. Combine that with all the new technologies, then what can we do? The exciting thing is: I don't know. Nobody knows how all the connectivity will merge and diverge and what the business models will be. Ultimately, somebody has to make money because we need to keep the roof over our heads and earn a living. I recognize that there has to be a business objective. But if we spent a little bit of time thinking about what the opportunities are, we could come up with a lot of new and exciting products that will improve peoples' lives and make money for the businesses creating them.

Wood: Perfect segue for my next question. Can you provide some examples of exceptional mobile user experiences on the market today, or applications or services available on handsets or mobile Internet devices?

Lenox: I posed this question to my colleagues at Adaptive Path when you sent me the questions in advance. I work with some amazingly talented and really smart people—we have a great mindshare. You can pose a question to the team and get a flood of information.

On the services side of things, the key is that it's less about the device and the actual hardware, but it's about the service and the connections that the services enable. Twitter, for example, I think is an obvious emerging service that is being used in ways that the folks at Twitter had no idea would happen. For example, during conferences people in the audience and even outside the audience are contributing to the dialogue through Twitter.

I used Twitter a lot while I was traveling for the last three weeks to keep everybody up to date. I'm not really a blogger and never wrote a blog prior to joining Adaptive Path. But I found that while I was traveling Twitter was a great way to keep people up to date. When I got back after three weeks, my colleague said, "You know, between your Twitters and your emails, I didn't really know you were gone." That was my intention. Three weeks is a long time to be away from the office, so by just keeping in touch a couple times a day, it made people feel like they were a part of what I was doing and stayed abreast of what was going on.

The different services available to connect us socially are really a phenomenal thing because we are all so dispersed. Our families are dispersed and our connections are all over the place. Twitter is a great example of a tool that enables us to be in touch.

I also used TripIt while I was away and that worked out great because I gave access to our administrative team. When a flight was cancelled, they could take care of it for me during business hours in the U.S. when I was asleep in Europe. I didn't have to dig through any paperwork or anything. I gave them access; they took care of it. Again, these services that happen in a mobile context or happen on your desktop—it really doesn't matter what or where the hardware is any more.

Wood: You mentioned abstract social factors and the ability to make connections and communicate with people. What are some abstract concepts you'd throw into the bucket of defining an exceptional experience for the mobile space?

Lenox: I think it's about bringing my stuff with me—my contacts, my music, being able to have my videos and accessing the various different types of small video clips, YouTube, and having everything personalized. I can collect these things, bring them with me, and share. That creates part of your social identity.

When you look at everybody's digital content—YouTube and Flickr streams, SlideShare presentations—it creates a portrait of who people are and becomes part of how they want to identify themselves and represent themselves to the world.

Wood: The concept is around anywhere and anytime accessibility. Whether or not your content is embedded in a device is irrelevant because it could be on a network, or local or on some kind of storage device attached to your mobile device. It's a matter of having things universally accessible and being able to tailor that content to your specific needs for that specific context at specific times.

Lenox: Generating your own content and making it accessible is also important. My way of doing that on my trip was through Twitter and Flickr. I uploaded photos to Flickr but I had a limited amount of mobile phone data that I could upload and download while I was in Europe, so I didn't do it on-the-fly from my mobile device all the time. That's one of those stumbling blocks. I could have been mobile blogging, had I wanted to fork out lots of money for the data plan (or if I had been traveling in North America, I suppose). But those are the types of constraints that are inhibiting the evolution of where the community is going to take this mobile culture. Technology is limited right now by cost and by bandwidth issues and is holding things to a slower pace than it ought to be.

Wood: I find it interesting that the consumer electronics market is fundamentally different than the traditional Web environment, or the RIA space—that user experience can affect market factors and consumer spending so strongly. Does the churn and cutthroat competition in the mobile handset market drive the progression of user experience?

Lenox: In any software development sector, a lot of really amazing stuff never sees the light of day. When I was working at Samsung, the number of amazing concepts that never saw daylight was phenomenal. Now that I'm working with other manufacturers here at Adaptive Path, it's really clear to me that it wasn't just Samsung. The entire consumer electronics industry generates a lot of really amazing ideas and very few of them actually make it to market.

That's disappointing to me as a designer because obviously designers get into the business because they're passionate about what they do and not because it's not an easy job to be a designer. The competition, the strenuous hours—people generally do it because they're passionate about it, because they want to make change, because they want to put cool products into people's hands. It's really frustrating to see so many great ideas not emerge.

When the iPhone came out, it was a really good thing for the industry and it was also a really bad thing. The good thing is that all the designers who had been working for years on similar concepts were able to say, "See, we could've done it." So that's a good thing. Now businesses are finally looking at designers and saying, "Oh, they knew what they were talking about. Look at that. It actually could work."

However, the bad side is that there will probably be a lot of me-too products coming out now. The companies that were already close to releasing their first touch screen or had released their touch screen—like the Prada Phone that came out easily six months or eight months before the iPhone—aren't getting enough play. Companies now will speed up the production of touch screen display phones that are already in the pipeline.

Matt Jones, one of the founders of Dopplr, brought up an interesting point. He basically thinks that the iPhone is actually going to stifle industry innovation simply because everybody's going to mimic the iPhone. So rather than thinking beyond the iPhone, everybody's just going to be duplicating it. In his theory, it's going to slow the pace of innovation because everybody's putting all of their energy on the me-toos instead of focusing energy beyond the iPhone to what's next. (And forgive me, Matt, if I've butchered your point).

Wood: Aside from industry influences like the iPhone and the Sony Xperia, do you think users expectations are really starting to change and evolve in a positive way?

Lenox: Users are expecting more now, which I think is great. The first mobile phone research study that I did at Samsung back in 2005 was with a group of 18 to 22-year-olds. I was absolutely astounded at how technically savvy these people were. Those of us who have been working in the technology industry for a long time understand hardware and software and what's client side, and what's up in the cloud. We understand the perimeters of software relationships. But I was amazed at how these young people understood all of that as well, were well versed in it, and yet weren't actually working in the industry. They were college students and were just playing around with HTML on MySpace. Our primary consumer has been raised on technology and is a lot savvier than the devices out there can actually accommodate.

That imbalance makes for some exciting possibilities. If we put something into the marketplace that's kind of cool and let the consumers do something with it, it will emerge and it will evolve. We need to allow for more of what the world is looking for, more social input from the consumer—an open source type of approach—rather than clamping things down and keeping access restricted. We need to allow users to play because they're going to take what we give them and use it in a different way than we expected—in ways that no use case scenario could have come up with, that no ethnographic study could have predicted. That's really exciting.

Wood: Sounds like the beginnings of a manifesto, Kim. I'm with you! This may be a politically charged question, but I really want to ask you what has been your favorite device to design for up to this point?

Lenox: It doesn't exist yet. There are too many limitations right now in the marketplace that prevent us from actually releasing what we want to.

Wood: Okay then, what types of devices do you use most frequently?

Lenox: Funny, I'm somewhat of a Luddite. I don't have cable television. I don't have the latest and greatest of home entertainment systems and that sort of thing. For my phone device, I had a Sidekick 2 for quite a while. I bought it in 2004, and I had a black and white version before that, which provided the best experience out there at the time. They got the service and experience right—offering a pleasurable user interface design with your data being stored server-side, up in the cloud. It was designed by Danger down in Palo Alto—one of the first device manufactures to really design around the user. Thinking about that device now in 2008, the user interface is not that compelling. But when you think about it seven years ago…

Wood: It was revolutionary.

Lenox: Absolutely revolutionary. The experience was limited somewhat by the hardware. It was targeted for a younger generation and not a business user. I probably should have had a Blackberry for the type of work that I was doing, but I didn't like the user experience. So I cobbled together my email, my contacts and my calendar. I had two sets of calendars, one on my Mac and another one on my device. I managed those within the limitations of the devices not talking well with each other. There was a piece of software that kind of patched it together, but even then, I never bothered buying it because I read about too may problems with it.

So I was a Sidekick user from 2002 to when the iPhone came out. That's a long time.

Wood: Really long! That just goes to show you just how much user experience can really influence both your purchasing decisions and your behavior in terms the applications and services that are available.

Lenox: Right.

Wood: We're willing to jump through hoops just to make things work because they are vastly superior to anything else on the market at the time.

Lenox: The Sidekick was pleasurable to use. I switched to the iPhone because it's also pleasurable to use. The subtly of the animation, the transitions, the movement—all that is actually enjoyable without being gratuitous. They did the right amount of informative animation (something is shrinking down because it's disappearing). Of course, the iPhone has a lot of limitations. I'm still struggling because I upgraded Tiger on my Mac and I haven't been able to sync my calendars since, which was the whole reason that I got the iPhone in the first place! Hopefully Apple's MobileMe will solve my problems soon.

Lenox: About designing for products that I'm interested in: for me it's more about designing for the experience, trying to solve problems, and unearthing unmet needs. Those are the things that are exciting to me. It doesn't really matter what the hardware is at this point. It's about figuring out how to make life easier and more pleasurable day-to-day.

Wood: Kim, thank you so much for taking the time to call in today.

Lenox: It's been a pleasure chatting with you.

This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see http://uxmag.com/uirc

Video interview with the one and only Sir Tim Berners-Lee where he discusses the semantic web as well as, rather interestingly, artificial lifeforms on the internet.

Video interview with the one and only Sir Tim Berners-Lee where he discusses the semantic web as well as, rather interestingly, artificial lifeforms on the internet.

Imagine shopping in a store where the displays never change. Customers select items by browsing through monolithic aisles of products. Store displays are minimal and uninteresting. Items in the displays are hard to find or even unavailable. This doesn't seem like a great shopping experience, does it? Yet this is what online shoppers experience (and accept as standard) on many large e-commerce sites.

At Allurent, our multi-disciplinary team of designers, information architects, user interface and visual designers are passionate about transforming online shopping from a utilitarian activity into an engaging, dynamic experience. We are convinced that online shopping can be infinitely more exciting and rewarding than the banal, page-and-scroll environment many of us settle for today. Improving the shopping experience can lead to the kind of metrics retailers dream about: increased consumer loyalty, better brand differentiation, higher conversion rates, greater customer satisfaction, and higher profits.

Online shopping should be a fluid, visually exciting and immersive experience. By designing great shopping experiences free from the constraints of HTML, we can fully exploit the rich audio, video, animation and user interface capabilities of modern personal computing.

Agility to respond

Traditionally, retailers need to plan to build new features, redesign, and merchandise their sites far in advance. The time-to-market cycle can be surprisingly slow. Today's merchandising tools are surprisingly primitive. At Allurent, we've been working on a set of solutions that enable companies to update and improve their sites quickly and easily.

For Borders, we recently built a feature called The Magic Shelf, which was an interesting challenge. Borders came to us with an interactive bookshelf that had already been built in Flash by an outside agency. Essentially, Borders populates the shelf with books and CDs, and customers can scroll horizontally and vertically across it. But Borders wasn't able to easily maintain the shelf or easily update the merchandise—and it was not commerce-enabled.

We rebuilt and redesigned the shelf and connected it to the Borders product catalog. Using our Visual Merchandiser, Borders is now able to change the bookshelves and merchandise on-the-fly with WYSWIG drag-and-drop simplicity. After Sydney Pollack passed away, Borders was able to populate a retrospective shelf of his work by the next morning. The time to go live was cut to only a few hours.

Catering gracefully to lifestyles

It's essential for retailers to come up with innovative approaches and multiple access points that cater to shifting lifestyles. Similar to having multiple brick-and-mortar locations, the online store needn't have just one location. Soon, there might not just be one Borders site. Rather, there may be a mobile site, an iPhone site, and a downloadable AIR application connected to all of the above. You will likely be able shop through your home entertainment system, via satellite applications, and on blogs through microsites.

Certain vertical markets are experimenting with new shopping experiences more deeply than others. The fashion industry, for example, with its increasing seasonal demands, is apt to innovate more aggressively than most. Fashion by nature lends itself to exciting imagery that can be put together in new ways relevant to different forms of media.

The "Swiss Army knife" approach

Retailers increasingly want to integrate diverse interactivity into their sites—ratings and reviews, links to Facebook and del.icio.us, tagging, videos, blogs and more. Yet retailers also want to their sites to be simpler and easier for customers to use.

The challenge on the part of designers is to take all of these features and make it feel like all feel like a rich, cohesive experience rather than a "Frankenstein" site. I like to use the analogy of a Swiss Army knife, where the customer has all the tools they need at their fingertips and can unfold them as needed. When they're not being used, everything folds neatly back into place and out of the main focus area.

Make shopping serendipitous

Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy and beneficial way.

Online shopping needs more serendipity to feel like an immersive and rich shopping experience. Customers need to brush up against items they weren't necessarily looking for. The practice is common in catalogues (think Crate & Barrel room views) and in brick-and-mortar stores (think wall displays and mannequins). Shoppers get to see a wide range of products, rather than tunnel down to one product category.

The online approach, however, has typically been organized into strict categories. If someone is looking for a top, they drill through the navigation to find pink tops. Navigationally, it's difficult to add or remove filters dynamically to browse in fluid ways. In the process, shoppers bypass everything else — except for the occasional cross-sell. Most of the site goes unnoticed.

We recently built an interesting serendipitous solution for Anthropologie. Using Adobe AIR, customers can download a portion of the Anthropologie catalog to their desktop. The catalog was based loosely on a theme. The initial version has a beach theme. Sandals, swimsuits, sunglasses and other "beachy" products were scattered along a horizontal strip. The layout had a handmade quality and felt unique and special rather than generic and automated.

Our Display tool allowed merchandisers to easily drop products from the catalog onto the strip, rather than having to open Flash and manually create links or embed imagery in the application. Customers were able scroll through the strip, add notes to items of interest and purchase. Each product felt specially chosen and the experience felt more like shopping at a boutique rather than shopping at the local home center for clothing.

The most unique feature was "shop by color," where customers selected favorite hues from a color palette, and saw products that matched displayed in a color wheel. The randomness in the product selection and the immediate dynamic quality made it fun to use as well as different from other shopping experiences. Instead of shopping for a specific product, customers were browsing in a way that was similar to walking into an Anthropologie store.

Retail role models

So what are some of the shopping experiences I like? In recent years, Nike has been doing an outstanding job extending its brand. Its mini sites are all amazing and unique, yet clearly remain under the same branded umbrella. They're innovative, usable, push the boundaries and are still very shoppable.

Etsy.com is a marketplace where people can sell handmade goods. Etsy offers a number of different ways to view merchandise on the site: chronologically, by color, by story, or by category. Etsy lets consumers discover the products in a way that works for them.

Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters know their demographic inside and out. They continuously innovate by adding Flash-based themed microsites, blogs and even extending their brands to YouTube.

Home furnishing giant Ikea has been doing a great job offering interactive video online to walk potential buyers through fully merchandised rooms—just like you'd shop in any of their physical retail locations. Each room is very different and even employ actors with different personalities that help customers better relate.

Uniqlo is a Japanese retailer that's moving into the U.S. and doing some really interesting things with navigation. Using their Uniqlo Explorer on their US site, customers see a full page product image. The image then transforms into a bitmap image. The bitmap is composed of a matrix of tiny product shots. Clicking on small product shot will display that product full-screen and then transform that image into a matrix of other products.

The Volkswagon.co.uk site does a great job of integrating video and offering a fluid car configurator application. There's a lot of functionality and features, yet it feels simple and fun to use. Finally, Ralph Lauren's Rugby.com site does a great job of extending the brand using video, interesting displays, and styling tips, resulting in a cohesive, rich experience.

Walking the fine line between innovative and useful

As users become more sophisticated and retailers compete more fiercely for online market share, design teams are challenged to find the balance between innovation and usability. We do a lot of user testing throughout our design and development processes, and strive to make it easy for a buyer to make a decision by decreasing steps, no matter how traditional or innovative the design is. We're always looking for ways to streamline the approach by eliminating pages and unnecessary information that customers have to wade through to get to that the ultimate destination: a purchase.

Of course, our clients have specific business goals that drive the project. In some cases, they're looking for a better checkout experience. Other times, they want to improve the overall experience, gain traction over the competition, or rebuild their site from the ground up. If we meet the client's goals, the success metrics will follow. For example, Anthropologie realized a 24% increase in conversion rate with its new checkout system over the previous HTML cart, and Urban Outfitters experienced similar results.

Of course, we follow an internal process that involves a discovery phase, wireframing, and prototyping, user testing, and then implementation. When we go live, we watch the analytics information carefully. The ultimate user test is when thousands of people go through your site and we see where they're really going and where they may be dropping off. At that point, we streamline things further.

Journeying with new tools

With Adobe's new tools, particularly Flash Catalyst, the advancements in Flex, and the introduction of Adobe AIR, it's a really exciting time for design teams. More developers are jumping on the Flex bandwagon. Increasingly streamlined workflows between designers and developers are going to result in complex applications that feel more cinematic and operate pagelessly.

Allurent is the first company I've worked where it hasn't felt like designers are throwing things over the wall to the developers. There's a huge amount of back-and-forth between the development and design teams. We have some high-level developers who have worked on really complex backend e-commerce systems, as well as front-facing applications. During iterations, these developers can really help inform our design work. I'm constantly working with developers and tweaking transitions between different types of information, working on the fluidity of applications and how they feel.

It's an interesting, exciting time. Like so many other designers who started out in print, leapt onto the Web, and are now immersed in rich interactivity, I feel lucky. The shopping niche is a corner of commerce where designers can step back and see their efforts realized through real-world success.

This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see http://uxmag.com/uirc

Imagine shopping in a store where the displays never change. Customers select items by browsing through monolithic aisles of products. Store displays are minimal and uninteresting. Items in the displays are hard to find or even unavailable. This doesn't seem like a great shopping experience, does it? Yet this is what online shoppers experience (and accept as standard) on many large e-commerce sites.

At Allurent, our multi-disciplinary team of designers, information architects, user interface and visual designers are passionate about transforming online shopping from a utilitarian activity into an engaging, dynamic experience. We are convinced that online shopping can be infinitely more exciting and rewarding than the banal, page-and-scroll environment many of us settle for today. Improving the shopping experience can lead to the kind of metrics retailers dream about: increased consumer loyalty, better brand differentiation, higher conversion rates, greater customer satisfaction, and higher profits.

Online shopping should be a fluid, visually exciting and immersive experience. By designing great shopping experiences free from the constraints of HTML, we can fully exploit the rich audio, video, animation and user interface capabilities of modern personal computing.

Agility to respond

Traditionally, retailers need to plan to build new features, redesign, and merchandise their sites far in advance. The time-to-market cycle can be surprisingly slow. Today's merchandising tools are surprisingly primitive. At Allurent, we've been working on a set of solutions that enable companies to update and improve their sites quickly and easily.

For Borders, we recently built a feature called The Magic Shelf, which was an interesting challenge. Borders came to us with an interactive bookshelf that had already been built in Flash by an outside agency. Essentially, Borders populates the shelf with books and CDs, and customers can scroll horizontally and vertically across it. But Borders wasn't able to easily maintain the shelf or easily update the merchandise—and it was not commerce-enabled.

We rebuilt and redesigned the shelf and connected it to the Borders product catalog. Using our Visual Merchandiser, Borders is now able to change the bookshelves and merchandise on-the-fly with WYSWIG drag-and-drop simplicity. After Sydney Pollack passed away, Borders was able to populate a retrospective shelf of his work by the next morning. The time to go live was cut to only a few hours.

Catering gracefully to lifestyles

It's essential for retailers to come up with innovative approaches and multiple access points that cater to shifting lifestyles. Similar to having multiple brick-and-mortar locations, the online store needn't have just one location. Soon, there might not just be one Borders site. Rather, there may be a mobile site, an iPhone site, and a downloadable AIR application connected to all of the above. You will likely be able shop through your home entertainment system, via satellite applications, and on blogs through microsites.

Certain vertical markets are experimenting with new shopping experiences more deeply than others. The fashion industry, for example, with its increasing seasonal demands, is apt to innovate more aggressively than most. Fashion by nature lends itself to exciting imagery that can be put together in new ways relevant to different forms of media.

The "Swiss Army knife" approach

Retailers increasingly want to integrate diverse interactivity into their sites—ratings and reviews, links to Facebook and del.icio.us, tagging, videos, blogs and more. Yet retailers also want to their sites to be simpler and easier for customers to use.

The challenge on the part of designers is to take all of these features and make it feel like all feel like a rich, cohesive experience rather than a "Frankenstein" site. I like to use the analogy of a Swiss Army knife, where the customer has all the tools they need at their fingertips and can unfold them as needed. When they're not being used, everything folds neatly back into place and out of the main focus area.

Make shopping serendipitous

Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy and beneficial way.

Online shopping needs more serendipity to feel like an immersive and rich shopping experience. Customers need to brush up against items they weren't necessarily looking for. The practice is common in catalogues (think Crate & Barrel room views) and in brick-and-mortar stores (think wall displays and mannequins). Shoppers get to see a wide range of products, rather than tunnel down to one product category.

The online approach, however, has typically been organized into strict categories. If someone is looking for a top, they drill through the navigation to find pink tops. Navigationally, it's difficult to add or remove filters dynamically to browse in fluid ways. In the process, shoppers bypass everything else — except for the occasional cross-sell. Most of the site goes unnoticed.

We recently built an interesting serendipitous solution for Anthropologie. Using Adobe AIR, customers can download a portion of the Anthropologie catalog to their desktop. The catalog was based loosely on a theme. The initial version has a beach theme. Sandals, swimsuits, sunglasses and other "beachy" products were scattered along a horizontal strip. The layout had a handmade quality and felt unique and special rather than generic and automated.

Our Display tool allowed merchandisers to easily drop products from the catalog onto the strip, rather than having to open Flash and manually create links or embed imagery in the application. Customers were able scroll through the strip, add notes to items of interest and purchase. Each product felt specially chosen and the experience felt more like shopping at a boutique rather than shopping at the local home center for clothing.

The most unique feature was "shop by color," where customers selected favorite hues from a color palette, and saw products that matched displayed in a color wheel. The randomness in the product selection and the immediate dynamic quality made it fun to use as well as different from other shopping experiences. Instead of shopping for a specific product, customers were browsing in a way that was similar to walking into an Anthropologie store.

Retail role models

So what are some of the shopping experiences I like? In recent years, Nike has been doing an outstanding job extending its brand. Its mini sites are all amazing and unique, yet clearly remain under the same branded umbrella. They're innovative, usable, push the boundaries and are still very shoppable.

Etsy.com is a marketplace where people can sell handmade goods. Etsy offers a number of different ways to view merchandise on the site: chronologically, by color, by story, or by category. Etsy lets consumers discover the products in a way that works for them.

Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters know their demographic inside and out. They continuously innovate by adding Flash-based themed microsites, blogs and even extending their brands to YouTube.

Home furnishing giant Ikea has been doing a great job offering interactive video online to walk potential buyers through fully merchandised rooms—just like you'd shop in any of their physical retail locations. Each room is very different and even employ actors with different personalities that help customers better relate.

Uniqlo is a Japanese retailer that's moving into the U.S. and doing some really interesting things with navigation. Using their Uniqlo Explorer on their US site, customers see a full page product image. The image then transforms into a bitmap image. The bitmap is composed of a matrix of tiny product shots. Clicking on small product shot will display that product full-screen and then transform that image into a matrix of other products.

The Volkswagon.co.uk site does a great job of integrating video and offering a fluid car configurator application. There's a lot of functionality and features, yet it feels simple and fun to use. Finally, Ralph Lauren's Rugby.com site does a great job of extending the brand using video, interesting displays, and styling tips, resulting in a cohesive, rich experience.

Walking the fine line between innovative and useful

As users become more sophisticated and retailers compete more fiercely for online market share, design teams are challenged to find the balance between innovation and usability. We do a lot of user testing throughout our design and development processes, and strive to make it easy for a buyer to make a decision by decreasing steps, no matter how traditional or innovative the design is. We're always looking for ways to streamline the approach by eliminating pages and unnecessary information that customers have to wade through to get to that the ultimate destination: a purchase.

Of course, our clients have specific business goals that drive the project. In some cases, they're looking for a better checkout experience. Other times, they want to improve the overall experience, gain traction over the competition, or rebuild their site from the ground up. If we meet the client's goals, the success metrics will follow. For example, Anthropologie realized a 24% increase in conversion rate with its new checkout system over the previous HTML cart, and Urban Outfitters experienced similar results.

Of course, we follow an internal process that involves a discovery phase, wireframing, and prototyping, user testing, and then implementation. When we go live, we watch the analytics information carefully. The ultimate user test is when thousands of people go through your site and we see where they're really going and where they may be dropping off. At that point, we streamline things further.

Journeying with new tools

With Adobe's new tools, particularly Flash Catalyst, the advancements in Flex, and the introduction of Adobe AIR, it's a really exciting time for design teams. More developers are jumping on the Flex bandwagon. Increasingly streamlined workflows between designers and developers are going to result in complex applications that feel more cinematic and operate pagelessly.

Allurent is the first company I've worked where it hasn't felt like designers are throwing things over the wall to the developers. There's a huge amount of back-and-forth between the development and design teams. We have some high-level developers who have worked on really complex backend e-commerce systems, as well as front-facing applications. During iterations, these developers can really help inform our design work. I'm constantly working with developers and tweaking transitions between different types of information, working on the fluidity of applications and how they feel.

It's an interesting, exciting time. Like so many other designers who started out in print, leapt onto the Web, and are now immersed in rich interactivity, I feel lucky. The shopping niche is a corner of commerce where designers can step back and see their efforts realized through real-world success.

This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see http://uxmag.com/uirc

If you're a business or UX professional trying to decide how to focus your efforts to have the most impact, it's helpful to know which types of brands have the greatest opportunity to improve their online UX. To answer that question, it helps to first expand our view beyond the online world to understand which types of brands are expected to offer rich experiences in general (whether online through their websites, or offline in their stores).

Four factors that bear on customer expectations

1. Customers don't care about all brands equally. Even some brands that help them solve essential problems (e.g., heating their homes or feeding their families) are simply taken for granted. However, brands that serve a symbolic role in customers' lives—the brands that help people express their identity, tastes, and interests—garner greater interest. Customers tend to implicitly expect richer experiences when shopping brands that help them express some aspect of their identities. The identity-related qualities of a brand are intangible and are, in a way, invisible features of the brand's products. It takes a rich experience to bring those qualities to life and make them resonate with customers.
2. Some brands present customers with high-involvement, high-risk purchase decisions (e.g., buying a car). Customers typically want to analyze a wealth of information to help make the right decision. As their need for information increases, their need to have that information presented in a richer, more readily intelligible way also increases.
3. Certain brands, by their very nature, offer customers high levels of human interaction and product interaction prior to purchase (e.g., when buying a computer). The greater the level of interaction, the greater the potential and expectation for a richer experience.
4. Some brands are able to envelop their buyers. When you go through the door of a retail store, for instance, you're walking into the physical incarnation of the brand—it's all around you. Customers implicitly expect richer experiences from brands that feature enveloping environments.

Verticals where rich offline shopping experiences are the most prevalent

Some industries or verticals are more likely than others to contain brands that:

1. Garner high interest due to their identity-building qualities
2. Are high involvement
3. Have high levels of human interaction and product interaction
4. Feature enveloping environments

The strongest examples that come to mind are:

• Automotive (e.g., shopping for a new car at a dealership)
• Retail (e.g., shopping for clothes at an apparel store)
• Education (e.g., visiting schools as part of choosing a college)
• Real Estate (e.g., shopping for a home and walking through the models)

Within each of these verticals, brands have spent decades creating rich offline experiences. They've done such a good job that we have to come to implicitly expect rich experiences when shopping these verticals. Think about shopping for a new car, for example. It's a self-expressive, high-involvement purchase made in an engaging showroom with lots of personal assistance and a hands-on test drive. All of this adds to a rich offline experience.

The offline–online gap

If you're wondering where you should focus your efforts to have the most impact, look for brands with online experiences that don't yet match the richness of the offline experience they've spent decades honing. When a company has a significant gap between its offline and online experiences, customer expectations are not met, brand differentiation is diminished, and business is lost.

When your experience of a company's website falls short of the offline experience you've come to expect, you lose your motivation to complete the purchase online. If there's a retail outlet nearby, you may abandon the website with the plan of visiting the store to feel comfortable making the purchase. You wouldn't be alone; MIT's Technology Review (citing Jupiter Research) reports that for every $1 consumers spend online, they spend $6 dollars offline as a result of research they conducted on the Internet. But what about those times you don't get around to visiting the store, or it's simply too far away? Those become lost sales. Even if you do make the trip, it still feels like a preventable inconvenience, and like the brand has let you down. And what about those times you do put up with the website experience and make the purchase online? You may be left with an uneasy feeling, wondering if you made the right decision, and with a less favorable impression of the brand.

The greatest gaps

Drawing on my own observations, I estimated the size of the online–offline experience gaps in 13 key verticals.

The greatest gaps I identified are in retail, education, and healthcare. Within these verticals, companies have a huge opportunity to improve UX, especially relative to competitors in their verticals. Closing the online–offline gap improves customer satisfaction, enhances brand differentiation, and prevents lost sales.

It's important to note that not all brands within "big gap" verticals are expected to offer a rich experience. brands that emphasize low price are a key exception. In these cases people expect to forgo the rich experience in exchange for low prices.

But as you'll see in the next section, "big gap" brands are failing to offer online experiences that are differentiated from the experiences offered by low-price brands.

Mystery Shopping

Retail

I recently went shopping for a jacket in both the offline and the online world, first at Patagonia and Walmart stores, and then at patagonia.com and walmart.com. Patagonia is one of my favorite brands; by focusing on Patagonia I don't mean to pick on them, but instead to show that even the strongest brands have opportunities to improve their online UX.

The shopping experience at the Patagonia store was noticeably richer than Patagonia's online experience. The store experience provided a livelier ambiance and greater opportunities to interact with the product and with helpful employees. I found the Patagonia employees to be enthusiastic about the brand and capable of answering tough questions like, "which of these jackets provides more warmth and more breathability?" Although patagonia.com provides a richer experience than most outdoor apparel websites I've visited, the online experience didn't give me as much confidence to make a purchase as the offline experience did. Online, I struggled to choose between four different jackets and worried I'd make the wrong choice.

Patagonia and Walmart are two brands at opposite ends of the low-price/premium-quality spectrum. In the offline world, it'd be impossible to confuse the two—the videos make that abundantly clear. But as the screencasts show, my experiences shopping for jackets at patagonia.com and then walmart.com weren't nearly as different from each other as one might expect. If I had wandered around the sites a little more, I would have encountered interesting things on Patagonia's site such as the award-winning Tin Shed (a virtual shed full of interactive props and stories). But I was on the sites to shop for a jacket, not to wander around and check out peripheral Flash microsites.

During a separate patagonia.com shopping experience (this time shopping for a shirt), a chat box popped up and "Taylor" asked if she could help me. I had wanted personal assistance when I was shopping online for a jacket, but hadn't gotten it. This personal assistance, though a bit intrusive, would have certainly helped shrink the offline–online gap, differentiated the experience from the walmart.com experience, and guided me toward the right purchase decision. But perhaps there's even a better, less intrusive solution: adding a "Have a question? Chat live" button adjacent to product information. On occasion, I've seen a "Chat Live" button in the patagonia.com search area, but it's not always there and it's not in a place where you see it if you're looking at information about a jacket.

Patagonia.com could also be improved by increasing the use of video to augment product photos. After documenting my jacket shopping experience I took a deeper look at the site and found that 17 percent of their men's jacket listings included video depictions of the jacket. I hadn't stumbled on any of these during my initial shopping experience. If more jackets had accompanying videos, I would have been more likely to see a video. Well-produced videos enhance the richness and differentiation of the shopping experience, help close the offline–online gap, and guide customers toward making the right purchase decision.

Education

The selection of a college or university is one of the biggest decisions a person can make in life. In the offline world, you can stroll the campus, audit a class, have lunch with current students, tour the facilities, check out the social scene, and so on. But in my investigations I found that the online experiences in the education vertical generally don't match the offline experiences. Sure, you can watch a video or a virtual tour, but you're just watching from behind the glass, not actively participating and interacting. In the education vertical, as in the retail vertical, the gap between offline and online experiences compromises brand differentiation.

Let's say I want to get my MBA at a school that's convenient to where I live and work. I know I'll be spending a lot of time on campus, so I want to make sure it's an inspiring place that's conducive to learning and working with classmates. Based on their proximity to where I live and work, the schools I chose to investigate were the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and the Northglenn Center of Colorado Christian University (CCU). As you'll note in the screencasts, the schools' websites made it hard to get a feel for each campus and to get help making this high-involvement/high-risk decision. And what information I did find wasn't presented in a rich way.

The online experience left me feeling that I'd have to make an in-person visit to experience each campus. So I visited both schools.

As it turned out, my offline experience with each campus made the decision an easy one. At one school—the much more expensive one—I felt immersed in the experience as an engaged participant, rather than merely as an observer. It was indeed a rich experience—much more so than online—and it differentiated the school from its low-price counterpart.

Healthcare

To check out the offline experience in the healthcare vertical, my wife and I shopped for the hospital where we'll have our next baby. We toured the family birth center at Foothills Hospital in Boulder, and got to meet the doctor. We found the facility to be more like a resort than a hospital—there was a jetted tub in the birthing room, a DVD player and queen bed in the recovery room, and a beautiful lobby, cafe, and waiting room.

Had we checked out the hospital online instead, our experience would have been far different. We are making an emotionally significant, high-involvement decision, but the hospital's website fails to welcome us with a rich experience. The entry point into the website is cold and off-putting, in contrast to the hospital's warm and inviting lobby. After a bit of searching we found a simple "Welcome Tour" slide show, but it offered none of the richness of the offline tour.

Just as we saw within the retail and education verticals, the offline–online experience gap in healthcare means that brands are missing opportunities for differentiation. An actual visit to Foothills Hospital sets it apart from other hospitals, but a visit to their website does not. In fact, I found a richer online experience with a lower-priced hospital serving an area that's pretty much the opposite of happy-go-lucky Boulder: South Central L.A., including Compton and Watts.

Closing the Gap

The online experience doesn't need to exactly mirror the offline experience; they play complementary roles rather than act as alternatives to one another. But when it comes to satisfying customers, differentiating your brand, and winning business, the richness of the experiences should be on par with each other. It's about creating the same richness online as customers have come to expect from those brands through years of offline experiences.

A good example of a rich online experience that complements and is nearly on par with its offline counterpart is the Volvo Virtual Test Drive of City Safety. The online test drive allows the "driver" to experience the brand's automatic braking technology in a way that would be terrifying offline.

Juan Sanchez, a UX Magazine contributing editor, explained the importance of complementary experiences this way: "I think a lot of companies fall short by siloing their online and offline experiences, or by making them feel too much alike rather than having them work as companions. There are things that online or mobile experiences can do that an offline experience can't, and vice versa. Industries should take into account the ‘experience ecosystem.' They need to consider all the interaction touch points to make the online, offline, mobile, and other experiences seamless. If I do something online and then go into a physical store, there ought to be some overlap in the experiences to make the transition state a smooth and inviting one."

What do you think?

As you reflect on brands that are behind or ahead in closing the offline-online gap, please share your thoughts with us through comments. You can also record your comparisons as we've done in this article, and include a link to them in your response. Whoever provides the best laggard example (big gap) and leader example (no gap) will receive a gift certificate to either Patagonia or Walmart.

If you're a business or UX professional trying to decide how to focus your efforts to have the most impact, it's helpful to know which types of brands have the greatest opportunity to improve their online UX. To answer that question, it helps to first expand our view beyond the online world to understand which types of brands are expected to offer rich experiences in general (whether online through their websites, or offline in their stores).

Four factors that bear on customer expectations

1. Customers don't care about all brands equally. Even some brands that help them solve essential problems (e.g., heating their homes or feeding their families) are simply taken for granted. However, brands that serve a symbolic role in customers' lives—the brands that help people express their identity, tastes, and interests—garner greater interest. Customers tend to implicitly expect richer experiences when shopping brands that help them express some aspect of their identities. The identity-related qualities of a brand are intangible and are, in a way, invisible features of the brand's products. It takes a rich experience to bring those qualities to life and make them resonate with customers.
2. Some brands present customers with high-involvement, high-risk purchase decisions (e.g., buying a car). Customers typically want to analyze a wealth of information to help make the right decision. As their need for information increases, their need to have that information presented in a richer, more readily intelligible way also increases.
3. Certain brands, by their very nature, offer customers high levels of human interaction and product interaction prior to purchase (e.g., when buying a computer). The greater the level of interaction, the greater the potential and expectation for a richer experience.
4. Some brands are able to envelop their buyers. When you go through the door of a retail store, for instance, you're walking into the physical incarnation of the brand—it's all around you. Customers implicitly expect richer experiences from brands that feature enveloping environments.

Verticals where rich offline shopping experiences are the most prevalent

Some industries or verticals are more likely than others to contain brands that:

1. Garner high interest due to their identity-building qualities
2. Are high involvement
3. Have high levels of human interaction and product interaction
4. Feature enveloping environments

The strongest examples that come to mind are:

• Automotive (e.g., shopping for a new car at a dealership)
• Retail (e.g., shopping for clothes at an apparel store)
• Education (e.g., visiting schools as part of choosing a college)
• Real Estate (e.g., shopping for a home and walking through the models)

Within each of these verticals, brands have spent decades creating rich offline experiences. They've done such a good job that we have to come to implicitly expect rich experiences when shopping these verticals. Think about shopping for a new car, for example. It's a self-expressive, high-involvement purchase made in an engaging showroom with lots of personal assistance and a hands-on test drive. All of this adds to a rich offline experience.

The offline–online gap

If you're wondering where you should focus your efforts to have the most impact, look for brands with online experiences that don't yet match the richness of the offline experience they've spent decades honing. When a company has a significant gap between its offline and online experiences, customer expectations are not met, brand differentiation is diminished, and business is lost.

When your experience of a company's website falls short of the offline experience you've come to expect, you lose your motivation to complete the purchase online. If there's a retail outlet nearby, you may abandon the website with the plan of visiting the store to feel comfortable making the purchase. You wouldn't be alone; MIT's Technology Review (citing Jupiter Research) reports that for every $1 consumers spend online, they spend $6 dollars offline as a result of research they conducted on the Internet. But what about those times you don't get around to visiting the store, or it's simply too far away? Those become lost sales. Even if you do make the trip, it still feels like a preventable inconvenience, and like the brand has let you down. And what about those times you do put up with the website experience and make the purchase online? You may be left with an uneasy feeling, wondering if you made the right decision, and with a less favorable impression of the brand.

The greatest gaps

Drawing on my own observations, I estimated the size of the online–offline experience gaps in 13 key verticals.

The greatest gaps I identified are in retail, education, and healthcare. Within these verticals, companies have a huge opportunity to improve UX, especially relative to competitors in their verticals. Closing the online–offline gap improves customer satisfaction, enhances brand differentiation, and prevents lost sales.

It's important to note that not all brands within "big gap" verticals are expected to offer a rich experience. Brands that emphasize low price are a key exception. In these cases people expect to forgo the rich experience in exchange for low prices.

But as you'll see in the next section, "big gap" brands are failing to offer online experiences that are differentiated from the experiences offered by low-price brands.

Mystery Shopping

Retail

I recently went shopping for a jacket in both the offline and the online world, first at Patagonia and Walmart stores, and then at patagonia.com and walmart.com. Patagonia is one of my favorite brands, but even the strongest brands have opportunities to improve their online UX.

The shopping experience at the Patagonia store was noticeably richer than Patagonia's online experience. The store experience provided a livelier ambiance and greater opportunities to interact with the product and with helpful employees. I found the Patagonia employees to be enthusiastic about the brand and capable of answering tough questions like, "which of these jackets provides more warmth and more breathability?" Although patagonia.com provides a richer experience than most outdoor apparel websites I've visited, the online experience didn't give me as much confidence to make a purchase as the offline experience did. Online, I struggled to choose between four different jackets and worried I'd make the wrong choice.

Patagonia and Walmart are two brands at opposite ends of the low-price/premium-quality spectrum. In the offline world, it'd be impossible to confuse the two—the videos make that abundantly clear. But as the screencasts show, my experiences shopping for jackets at patagonia.com and then walmart.com weren't nearly as different from each other as one might expect. If I had wandered around the sites a little more, I would have encountered interesting things on Patagonia's site such as the award-winning Tin Shed (a virtual shed full of interactive props and stories). But I was on the sites to shop for a jacket, not to wander around and check out peripheral Flash microsites.

During a separate patagonia.com shopping experience (this time shopping for a shirt), a chat box popped up and "Taylor" asked if she could help me. I had wanted personal assistance when I was shopping online for a jacket, but hadn't gotten it. This personal assistance, though a bit intrusive, would have certainly helped shrink the offline–online gap, differentiated the experience from the walmart.com experience, and guided me toward the right purchase decision. But perhaps there's even a better, less intrusive solution: adding a "Question? Chat live" button adjacent to product information. On occasion, I've seen a "Chat Live" button in the patagonia.com search area, but it's not always there and it's not in a place where you see it if you're looking at information about a jacket.

Patagonia.com could also be improved by increasing the use of video to augment product photos. After documenting my jacket shopping experience I took a deeper look at the site and found that 17 percent of their men's jacket listings included video depictions of the jacket. I hadn't stumbled on any of these during my initial shopping experience. If more jackets had accompanying videos, I would have been more likely to see a video. Well-produced videos enhance the richness and differentiation of the shopping experience, help close the offline–online gap, and guide customers toward making the right purchase decision.

Education

The selection of a college or university is one of the biggest decisions a person can make in life. In the offline world, you can stroll the campus, audit a class, have lunch with current students, tour the facilities, check out the social scene, and so on. But in my investigations I found that the online experiences in the education vertical generally don't match the offline experiences. Sure, you can watch a video or a virtual tour, but you're just watching from behind the glass, not actively participating and interacting. In the education vertical, as in the retail vertical, the gap between offline and online experiences compromises brand differentiation.

Let's say I want to get my MBA at a school that's convenient to where I live and work. I know I'll be spending a lot of time on campus, so I want to make sure it's an inspiring place that's conducive to learning and working with classmates. Based on their proximity to where I live and work, the schools I chose to investigate were the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) and the Northglenn Center of Colorado Christian University (CCU). As you'll note in the screencasts, the schools' websites made it hard to get a feel for each campus and to get help making this high-involvement/high-risk decision. And what information I did find wasn't presented in a rich way.

The online experience left me feeling that I'd have to make an in-person visit to experience each campus. So I visited both schools.

As it turned out, my offline experience with each campus made the decision an easy one. At one school—the much more expensive one—I felt immersed in the experience as an engaged participant, rather than merely as an observer. It was indeed a rich experience—much more so than online—and it differentiated the school from its low-price counterpart.

Healthcare

To check out the offline experience in the healthcare vertical, my wife and I shopped for the hospital where we'll have our next baby. We toured the family birth center at Foothills Hospital in Boulder, and got to meet the doctor. We found the facility to be more like a resort than a hospital—there was a jetted tub in the birthing room, a DVD player and queen bed in the recovery room, and a beautiful lobby, cafe, and waiting room.

Had we checked out the hospital online instead, our experience would have been far different. We are making an emotionally significant, high-involvement decision, but the hospital's website fails to welcome us with a rich experience. The entry point into the website is cold and off-putting, in contrast to the hospital's warm and inviting lobby. After a bit of searching we found a simple "Welcome Tour" slide show, but it offered none of the richness of the offline tour.

Just as we saw within the retail and education verticals, the offline–online experience gap in healthcare means that brands are missing opportunities for differentiation. An actual visit to Foothills Hospital sets it apart from other hospitals, but a visit to their website does not. In fact, I found a richer online experience with a lower-priced hospital serving an area that's pretty much the opposite of happy-go-lucky Boulder: South Central L.A., including Compton and Watts.

Closing the Gap

The online experience doesn't need to exactly mirror the offline experience; they play complementary roles rather than act as alternatives to one another. But when it comes to satisfying customers, differentiating your brand, and winning business, the richness of the experiences should be on par with each other. It's about creating the same richness online as customers have come to expect from those brands through years of offline experiences.

A good example of a rich online experience that complements and is nearly on par with its offline counterpart is the Volvo Virtual Test Drive of City Safety. The online test drive allows the "driver" to experience the brand's automatic braking technology in a way that would be terrifying offline.

Juan Sanchez, a UX Magazine contributing editor, explained the importance of complementary experiences this way: "I think a lot of companies fall short by siloing their online and offline experiences, or by making them feel too much alike rather than having them work as companions. There are things that online or mobile experiences can do that an offline experience can't, and vice versa. Industries should take into account the ‘experience ecosystem.' They need to consider all the interaction touch points to make the online, offline, mobile, and other experiences seamless. If I do something online and then go into a physical store, there ought to be some overlap in the experiences to make the transition state a smooth and inviting one."

What do you think?

As you reflect on brands that are behind or ahead in closing the offline-online gap, please share your thoughts with us through comments. You can also record your comparisons as we've done in this article, and include a link to them in your response. Whoever provides the best laggard example (big gap) and leader example (no gap) will receive a gift certificate to either Patagonia or Walmart.

The internet has everything.

I better start using a headset. Hat tip: NewTeeVee Station and Phil Black.

YouTube - MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU. Hat tip: Clay Shirky.

CNET has a video on “Install a WordPress blog”, this came up at WordCamp and I think more of these would be a great idea. Here are some intro videos from EduBlogs.