nowherefast
A little bit from here, there and everywhere.
Jun 29
“ There’s no right or wrong, just the consequences of your actions.
— Becca Moody in Californication: In a lonely place.
Jun 26
Woolworths reborn online
Woolworths, which only six month ago closed it’s doors, has been given a second chance online (as promised by new owners Shop Direct).
Woolworths.co.uk is actually three shops:
- a main shop selling children’s toys and clothing;
- an entertainment shop selling video games, DVD, CDs; and
- a party goods shop selling fancy dress costumes, games and the iconic “pic n’mix” sweets.
At the moment, each shop has a separate checkout. If you move from one store to another with a filled basket, the website will prompt you to checkout before moving on. Apparently, there will be an integrated checkout by the autumn.
Anyway, the main question is whether there is a place in the market for a pure play Woolworths. Matthew Hardcastle, the head Woolworths, obviously thinks so:
“There has been a vacuum created by Woolworths’ disappearance, especially in the entertainment, toys and party areas.
“This venture is firmly focused on the family and will enable people to find everything under one roof but because it is now online we’ll be able to sell bulkier things and more products than you could get in a bricks and mortar store.”
Shop Direct seem to believe that nostalgia for Woolies and the Ladybird clothing brands is strong enough to bring the punters in. They want to challenge the likes of Amazon.com for entertainment and be a “destination site” for families.
Furthermore, Mark Newton-Jones, Shop Direct’s chief executive, says:
“This is about quality, value for money and great service. We’re not trying to compete to be the cheapest in any of our product categories.”
I was about to write that this was all ridiculous but, you know what, I’m going to throw the community card down. There may be something in this family market niche. So, this is not the Woolies that I knew. Woolworths on the high street wasn’t a destination per se but you always knew it was there and could wander in for a random browse or to satisfy your sugar craving with some pick n’ mix. The Woolies I knew clearly couldn’t survive on my impulse custom!
Creating a destination for families could work. I can see a community formed around parents of young kids. Sure, it’s not going to be a parenting site but even just sharing tips around party ideas and keeping the kids entertained is enough. Keeping on the party theme, there could be online tools that help you organise and plan an event.
What doesn’t quite work is thinking that the shopping experience is a family affair. I still don’t see families huddling around the PC after their Sunday lunches. Similarly, I don’t see parents letting their young children loose on the current website. There needs to be something cleverer here for kids (although the “click n’ mix” was quite fun). Perhaps bringing this experience around the TV could work better. I’m trying to imagine what the shopping experience would be like with four Wii controllers.
The current reincarnation of Woolworths isn’t much of a gamble for Shop Direct. I believe that there are possiblities to grow the business and breathe life back into the brand. However, the answer is definitely not a run-of-the-mill ecommerce offering, especially when you cannot compete on price.
Jun 14
From miso,’s photostream | Flickr
A collaboration with the amazing BuffDiss in Centre Place, Melbourne.
Jun 10
UNIQLO Calendar
Nice use of tilt-shift photography. UNIQLO are always experimenting with wacky viral advertising that get people to interact with the brand. If like me you can’t get over the weird effect of miniature faking, here are some more examples in Smashing Magazine.
» Prezi is the coolest online presentation tool I’ve ever seen | TechCrunch
By Robin Wauters. [April 20, 2009]
Why are we stuck with the metaphor of slides? Presentation tools have for too long limited the way we communicated. Prezi breaks the rigid slide-by-slide approach, easily allowing for non-linear presentations that can fluidly change altitude. The approach is a bit like flying across a jazzed up mindmap. A narrative path is created through a visual map, containing the words, links, images, video, etc. Interestingly, Microsoft Office Labs is also developing something similar called pptPlex.
Jun 08
» The importance of analytics in user experience | 90 Percent of Everything
By Harry Brignull. [June 5, 2009]
It just makes sense. You get convergence of findings (from two approaches), you spend your effort investigating and fixing things that matter, and you can measure the effectiveness of your design.
» Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London | guardian.co.uk
By Alison Flood. [April 24, 2009]
Is this the biggest change to the book business since Gutenberg? Until now, publishing houses mass produced books that sat in a warehouse that then either made it to shelves in a shop or were shipped directly to you. With printing on demand, the ‘presses’ are distributed and are happy turning out one or hundreds of books.
The Espresso Book Machine (see it on YouTube), described as an “ATM for books”, means that small independent bookshops can effectively compete on stock, authors can afford to self-publish, publishers can maintain availability for out of print books in between printing runs, publishers can hedge their bets on niche or untested publications and customers can define their preferred formats (e.g. large font, small book size).
Jun 07
» How to think outside the box | BusinessWeek
By Bill Buxton. [March 30, 2009]
It’s not all about the technology, stupid! How many times do we have to tell you? It’s about the users. Actually, it’s more than that, it’s about the context of use. As Buxton puts it:
User-centered design commonly tries to take into account different canonical user types through the use of persona. Perhaps one thing we need to do is to augment this tool with the notion of “placona,” that is, capturing the canonical set of physical and social spaces within which any activity we are trying to support might be situated. After all, cognition does not reside exclusively in the brain. Rather, it is also distributed in the space in which we exercise that knowledge—in the location itself, the tools, devices, and materials that we use, and the people and social context in which all of this exists.
Computing is no longer about one beige box, one user and one task. Our relationship to (and dependency on) it is increasingly complex and pervasive. For a product or system to have meaning (and value) to users, the measure of fit for purpose must include the physical, social and cultural ecosystem.
