AIAIO: Our Blog

Here’s some smart CRM: Staples tracks in-store purchase history by credit card.

I recently found myself with a (rather expensive) box of printer ink for a printer I no longer use. The ink was not a terribly recent purchase, and I had no receipt for it. But I didn’t need it, and I knew it came from Staples.

So off to Staples I went, ready with my best pained eyebrows and apologies. Which were swiftly interrupted by the cashier, who asked, “Do you have the credit card you purchased it with?”

“I assume this is the card,” I said, handing over my American Express. She swiped it into her register, confirmed my name, found the ink in my purchase history and promptly processed my refund. No signature required.

This system must have taken much effort and expense on Staples’ part. But it’s so simple and rewarding, it deserves to be implemented elsewhere.

The New York Times ran an article in its weekly automobiles section this weekend on Ford’s use of personas in designing the new Fiesta.
“ANTONELLA is an attractive 28-year old woman who lives in Rome. Her life is focused on friends and fun, clubbing and parties,” the article begins. “She is also completely imaginary. But her influence is definitely real.”
I read this with a smirk, because Ai, and many of our wise peers, use personas in web design all the time. Whether formal or informal, it’s part of the user-centric design process that defines our work.
Personas (a word the Times didn’t use) are depictions of typical users of a product or, for us, a website. They provide a brief but defining sketch of a hypothetical individual whose needs and opinions are crucial to a project’s success.
On complex projects, Ai crafts a robust personas brief. It defines the main demographic and psychographic users of a website, and allows our teams to think as our targets think as we do our work.
Personas are just as important on smaller projects. While we might not formalize our personas work, we place the users front and center in our discovery research, asking: who is this site targeting? And how do these people achieve success?
Ford’s use of personas is not remarkable–it’s sensible, and a promising sign for America’s last major automaker.

Ai’s own David Wertheimer is reviewing noise-canceling headphones on Boing Boing this summer. His first review, of the Etymotic hf2, just went live.
David has been (proudly and loudly) sampling headphones in the office and on his bike rides every day. The series should be fun to read. Stay tuned.

Ecommerce startup Alice got some nice business press last week around the launch of its site.
The concept, say the founders, is a novel one: they’re acting as a clearinghouse for CPG products, and compiling consumer data to share back with manufacturers. Rather than buy wholesale and sell at retail, Alice is only a platform, taking a fee for sales. Manufacturers control the pricing, and the fees pay for across-the-board free shipping.
On the surface, this sounds like an innovation. But is it really so different from what has come before? Amazon has a wealth of services designed to let companies sell direct to consumers, aggregate data, and defer shipping responsibilities–just like Alice.
Other not-quite-a-third-party structures have been attempted online, too, just not with exactly this structure. Consider Gloss, which was a “brand neutral” ecommerce site owned by three different cosmetics companies. Gloss.com operated as an independent entity, with the three owners paying relative shares of the operating costs (and the profit, theoretically). Sounds a lot like Alice, just with a different ownership structure.
Alice is a novel approach to retailing as an ecommerce site; the UI has lots of interesting details that will be reviewed here shortly. But the business model, while clever, is less than all-new.