Online Shopping is Broken

I want to run a brief thought experiment if you’ll indulge me. I want you to think about buying clothing online and try to relate this to shopping in-store. Let’s say you need a new shirt. You navigate to your favorite outfitter much in the same way (but simpler) that you would walk to the nearest outlet. You browse the site by clicking through links and looking for things you like, similar to how you would walk through a store, scanning for something that catches your eye. So far, the online experience sounds very similar to in-store, if not better.

However, here is where the experience goes to shit.

In a store, once you find something you like, you pick it up off the rack, feel the material, hold it up to yourself as a quick size check, grab an adjacent size to be safe, nip into a fitting room to try it on and, if satisfied, head to the checkout. Imagine if we forced this process to match the current online model: all of the clothing would be on a wall behind the checkout and before touching anything, holding it up for sizing or taking things into a fitting room, the store would require full payment.

This is not how people want to shop.

Granted not every online experience follows this model and not all shopping experiences demand the same level of interaction and involvement as clothing. Music, film, books, electronics and other products that do not rely so heavily on look, feel and specific usage have done very well in online retail and in some cases, digital sales have surpassed brick and mortar. However, there are still a number of industries – clothing, food, personal care, furniture, musical instruments to name a few – that for any number of reasons, have yet to become hot tickets for online sale.

At the core, certain purchases need to be experienced first. We need to know how something looks, feels or sounds in-person before we buy it. Some companies have found ways around this, however, many still struggle.  Here are a few suggestions for the online retailers of the world.

Virtual Avatars

In the absence of being able to try clothing on, a digital avatar could be used to show how articles would look on a virtual version of you.  Tesco launched a pilot of such a service earlier in 2012 for women to try their F&F clothing range.  A German company,UPcload, is also working on the same technology and has already started to build a network of retailers across Europe and North America. The technology is getting there, however, the question still remains as to whether people will use this service and more importantly, if it will encourage them to buy.

Product Profiling

A great deal of apprehension around purchasing something online (or in-store for that matter) is knowing whether it will work for you. Finding products that match our personality, style and needs can be a challenging endeavor. If more websites were able to recommend products based on alignment with our individual personalities, people may be more willing to buy things. Recommendation engines have been very successful for products like music, books and movies, so why can other online retailers not take a more personalized approach to their customer and help them navigate the sea of online options? Some sites like Jewelmint and Shoedazzle have attempted this approach, however, it seems that no one has been able to implement this on a larger scale and across a broader set of products.

Free Returns

Perhaps the biggest step forward (though possibly the most difficult to financially justify) would be to allow free, no-hassle returns on items. Better yet, individuals should be able to order whatever they want and after reviewing, only be charged for what they keep. Financial reality has a thing or two to say about this feature, however, for my money, this would definitely encourage my online shopping behaviors.

These are just a few ideas to encourage online shopping. While they may not be overly groundbreaking, they are a far cry more than what the bulk of online retailers are currently doing to encourage customers to buy digitally. E-commerce sites need to step up their game and work to remove some of the frictions of online retail. Do a good enough job at this, and I promise I’ll never buy brick and mortar again.

Design for Nerds

Modern chain hotels have become design beacons for the latest in hip, chic and stylish flare. Their lobbies are adorned with progressive art installations. Their restaurants feature the latest trends and crazes in high-end food experience. Their bars are some of the swankest nightclubs in the city. However, is all this panache missing the point and even alienating some patrons?

We are currently experiencing the rise in a new segment of power players on a global business scene: the nerd. Lost are the days of wedgies and name-calling; the nerd has now taken a prominent place near the top of the social ladder. Champions of software in a digital age, fan-boy gurus in an era of comic culture, entrepreneurial rebels in a time where big business is giving way to the little guy – we are part way through a shift where the nerd is becoming the cool kid.

Yet while many industries have embraced this new four-eyed segment, the travel and tourism industry still feels to be largely clinging to a past of letterman jackets and wet-towel whips. Where are the ping-pong tables and bean-bag chairs? Where is the gaming room and fully-integrated, hotel room Xbox system? Where is the hotel social networking site to help me find a dinner guest? Where are the interactive bar tables? And perhaps most importantly, where is my robot butler?

A handful of hotels have cropped up in recent years that are capitalizing on this opportunity. Hotel Tomo in San Francisco features anime-inspired décor and deluxe gaming suites with 6ft screens. The Pod Hotel in New York has been nicknamed the “Facebook Hotel” for creating an environment of sharing and connecting with other guests. The Capsule Inn in Tokyo is designed around fully-integrated sleeping modules that leave every needed device – TV, radio, clock, etc – accessible from the supine position in bed.

However, the Marriotts, Hiltons and Sheratons of the world continue to churn out clones of themselves designed around appealing to their vision of the typical traveller – a segment which is shrinking over time and may never have existed as they were perceived in the first place. Typical is becoming atypical, people’s tastes are evolving and hotel patrons are hungry for unique experiences. Who has the guts to step up and try cooking something new?

Robots Control Your Mind

It’s a classic theme used in fiction: sci-fi writers and filmmakers create a dystopian future where robots use twisted logic around Asimov’s seminal 3 laws to decide that humanity can’t protect itself and therefore, must be imprisoned and controlled (I’ll admit, a bit of a stretch). Humanity, in its ever-present struggle for laziness and infinite-sigma efficiency, will go to lengths so extreme as to create an artificial consciousness that will one day overthrow us all. Sure, it seems like the stuff of…well, sci-fi…however, an even greater stretch is my argument that even without achieving the nirvana of robotic artificial intelligence, robots may already control the way we eat, sleep, work and generally, live.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me first preface these crooked words. As an undergraduate engineer, I lucked upon the opportunity of a lifetime. During my degree I worked part time and summers at McGill University’s Ambulatory Robotics lab: one of the world’s leading labs in the robotics movement of the early 2000s. While I went into the role thinking I would spend my days playing with strange, futuristic toys (I did), the lab and the people around me made me realize that robotics was about so much more. Robots had already become pervasive in our society to the point that individuals barely acknowledged them as robots. A microwave, a thermostat, ATMs, RC toys, pacemakers, coffeemakers – all are examples of robots: machines capable of carrying out multi-stage actions autonomously.

And while a far cry from padded-room imprisonment, in many ways, robotic technology has already drastically altered the way we live our lives. Some of these alterations have been improvements in efficiency, increases in public safety or departures from menial, pointless tasks. However, in losing many of these traditional touch points, so have we evolved as a species and lost pieces of ourselves. We have allowed robots in all shapes and sizes to define some very integral elements of our lives and in doing so, removed much of our own ability to take care of ourselves.

Whereas once, we were a society of people who slept and woke by the sun, accurate telling of time and perhaps the most vile of technology’s satanic spawn – the alarm clock – changed our sleep patterns, and more importantly, set the tone for a culture driven by hyper efficiency and to-the-second timing. First thing each morning, we allow a small machine to scream at us until we begin our day and in doing so, lock ourselves into an unnatural state of existence; living by the artificial construct of the 24hr clock instead of the age-old guide, the sun. We wake ourselves when we’re still tired and we sleep in when we don’t need to knowing that we have a “few more minutes.” This practice was found so unnatural that it even facilitated another key invention in the digital time-keeping era: the snooze button.

Within the workforce, robots have been changing our social structures, economic behaviors and primary tasks for nearly 100 years. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution and assembly line manufacturing, business has strived to algorithmise operations, remove inefficiency and where possible, take human interaction completely out of the equation. The impact of robotics in the business world is impossible to ignore and has caused a rapid acceleration in the evolution of job functions, particularly in western nations. Our great-grandparents were primarily tradesmen, our grandparents began to explore greater entrepreneurialism, our parents became office managers and our generation has become an army of digital workers. Robots are slowly but surely heralding the death of the blue collar.

But should we be concerned by any of this? As I described before, the process is an evolution – one where “fittest” is defined not by survival but instead by task automation. We are changing as a society and while elements of this change are undeniably unnatural, human beings have adapted to worse and will continue to adapt. We will continue to distance ourselves further from skilled labor, connection to the earth and the humility of working with our hands. However, only time will tell the true impact that this will have of the human body, mind and soul.

Just remember, Will Smith won’t always be around to save us.

Traveling Without Moving

At the tender age of 30 (the new 20?), I’ve had the opportunity to travel more than generations prior could have ever dreamed (I’m two continents short of the full set). My parent’s generation, while definitively embracing the ability to travel, still lacked the speed, ease and affordability of travel options that exist today. Increasing globalization has opened up borders and options for travel that have never existed before.

However, could my generation be the peak of global travel?

As communication technologies become more ubiquitous and lifelike, we are starting to see a decreased need for individuals to travel the world. Even in the face of reduced travel costs and relaxed political regulation, it is often difficult to justify a trip when so many global interactions can be experienced from the comfort of your own desk. Unquestionably, there will always be a demand to see the sunset past the Eiffel tower with your own eyes, to smell the air at the Cape of Good Hope or to hear the echo off the inside of the Taj Mahal. People will always have a desire to explore, adventure and to see the world.

But what of more mundane travel? What of long business flights? What of lonely hotel rooms? What of expensive travel per diems?

I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting in a Cisco Tele-presence room. While the experience wasn’t quite up to the promise of fooling me into standing to shake the client’s hand at the end, the technology was impressive and left very little lacking in the way of non-verbal communication (which, as you know, I went on a bit of a rant about recently). Was this experience as good as a face-to-face meeting? No. However, it provided a close enough approximation at a fraction of the cost. More importantly, the cost is steadily decreasing and the technology is rapidly improving (hell, we’ve almost caught up to Star Trek).

Yet what of the leisure traveler? Will there always be a demand for people who want to experience culture first hand? In a word (or four), yes, but decreasingly so.

Globalization, while bringing the world’s population closer together than ever before, has had a reverse effect on our need to explore the planet. Whereas previous generations had to travel to Japan (or the most exclusive, expensive restaurants) to sample sushi, our generation buys $8.99 lunch special bento boxes two doors down. Culture, food, music, art, sport, design… even people… have spread so rapidly and ubiquitously around the world that we no longer need to travel in order to experience other societies; we simply walk 10 blocks. If this trend continues, then soon we will live in an era where the planet is one big societal melting pot that speaks English and Mandarin (flies in renegade spaceships, lives as outlaws and runs from oppressive governments and crazed space-monster humans).

Google is not without blame for our increasingly sedentary lives either. The Web has afforded us near instantaneous access to a vast bank of knowledge and a platform for global communication. It used to be that to find out what the Blarney Stone tasted like, you’d have to get over to Cork and kiss it yourself. Now, one can read hundreds of in-depth reviews describing the texture, look, sounds, smells, tastes of the stone and likely even a recipe or two for someone’s Blarney Stone soup. If you think I’m exaggerating both the level of fidelity and the coverage of information that Google provides, why not take a brief trip to the Antarctic?

Me, I’m a bit of a puritan. I believe that to truly appreciate a culture, one must immerse themselves in it and experience it first-hand. However, not everyone is like me. Some people are happy with pictures of the Pyramids. Many argue that the best curry in the world exists around the corner from their place. Certain individuals may even prefer to program their treadmill to simulate the Great Wall instead of visiting it themselves.

However, to everyone else, I implore you:

Go out and see the world before it comes to you.

Not Who I Say I Am

Do you think that your social profile is an accurate representation of who you are? Sure, we can learn a thing or two about individuals by reading their profiles, however, to what degree are these content feeds an accurate representation of self and to what degree are they calculated, overly filtered bullshit?

We’ve all done it – detagged hideous Facebook photos, retweeted articles we didn’t even fully read or perfectly crafted the words on our LinkedIn profile to make the ideal corporate elevator pitch. At the core, social media platforms are like diet versions of ourselves; you get the rough flavour, but don’t have to worry about any of the unhealthy sugars or fats. However, is there a digital aspartame that exists as a result of our social preening; one which, much like the chemical equivalent, raises large questions about a potential cancer growing within our society?

This is by no means a new phenomenon. Humans have been misrepresenting themselves in society since the dawn of man. The first cavemen likely exaggerated about the size of the mammoth they caught each time they told the story. There was a Pope who historians believe was a woman. Tchaikovsky supposedly had a thing for young boys. Einstein was a philanderer. Churchill was a big racist. Clinton inhaled. Clemens juiced. And each and every one of them went to grandiose efforts to cover up their social malfeasance.

However, we Millennials have been afforded a very unique situation through the advent of social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Youtube have enabled us to exchange more “rich” information than ever before, however, this information lacks important social context that people have typically used to develop an understanding of one another. Our misrepresentation exists under three very different conditions than that of previous generations.

First, social media depersonalizes communication and human interaction, making it incredibly difficult to gauge the authenticity. Simple things such as body language, vocal tone, eye movement and poise are pieces of information that we subconsciously process when speaking to another individual in order to frame the conversation. Through text, this information which I previously touted as being “rich” has suddenly lost all social context, leaving us with no way to gauge the intangible elements of in-person communication.

Second, social media has changed the very way we communicate. Whereas historical communication was typically an interaction between a small group of individuals (often two), social media has turned communication into a process of broadcasting and lurking. When posting on Facebook, we are broadcasting to hundreds or thousands of individuals and therefore, don’t frame our message for a tangible individual or group, but instead for a vague interpretation of what we call our network. Equally, when receiving information, we passively consume content: we lurk on Facebook photos, we scan through vast RSS feeds or tweets and we read up on a known or unknown individual’s social profile.

Lastly, electronic communication (social media, text, email) allows us to revise and edit our words to perfection before releasing them upon the world. Sure, this ability is fantastic when sending something off to a boss or client, however, it erodes one of the most important aspects of human life: failure. Blurting out the first thing that comes to mind in conversation can lead to awkwardness, confusion and embarrassment. Yet it is these very moments that break down our emotional walls and allow us to grow together. No one wants to live in a perfect, padded world where spontaneity is absent and things run like clockwork.

At least we still have auto-correct.

At the core, this change in communication manifests itself in one very simple but important takeaway: your social media profiles are not authentic representations of you. They are ideal aspirations of yourself that you consciously or subconsciously tailor for the whole world to consume and think better of you for it.

For organizations attempting to play in the social media sphere, this outlines an important learning about the value and quality of social graph data. For individuals trying to get to know one another and have genuine, honest relationships, this raises a frightening red flag about the way we interact and what this type of disingenuous communication may be doing to our society as a whole.

…Then again, I might be saying all of this just to appear smart.