The pulse of Alexander Interactive

PSFK has published a report (disconcerting, damning or riotous, depending on your station) showing that many top luxury brand websites don’t function on the iPad. (That image above is the Prada home page.) Given that Apple buyers are often luxury product consumers, this is a glaring omission for some of the world’s strongest brands.

The iPad is a reminder that the web is now rapidly moving away from the “build a website, let it run” strategy. A growing diversity of web-enabled devices is going to force companies to build websites that make usability the prime directive. The direct problem is the use of Flash, but the real issue is the lack of universal accessibility.

The growth in broadband mobile networks has led to rapid adoption of web access by consumers. Smartphones are nearing 20% of the American cellular marketplace and are expected to reach 30% soon. Ai clients saw growth in mobile traffic as high as 600% over 2009 alone.

The iPad is the latest and most profound bellwether in this usage shift. Contemplating how to service users with 1.5″ BlackBerry screens was one thing; dealing with iPad users, with their 1024×768 screens and just-like-a-laptop-only-better expectations, is entirely another. And while the iPad may be just a first step in an evolution, a million unit sales in a month suggests someone found the keys to the steamroller.

Computers are not going away; manufacturers shipped 68 million of them in 2008 alone. More important is the fragmentation of the marketplace, which, years after homogenizing almost entirely in Internet Explorer for Windows, is now an open landscape. Four different browsers have substantial (greater than 3%) market share. And dozens of devices are now displaying web pages in displays ranging from 320 to 1920 pixels in width, both with and without Flash.

The requirement for 2010, then, is to adapt to the fragments. Good websites need to actively identify visitors’ platforms and deliver user-centric results–not just the Amazons and Facebooks of the web, but the many small- and medium-size sites that encourage exploration and engagement. As platforms continue to diversify, creating flexible, accessible sites is a must.

The New York Times reports ecommerce is shrinking this month, the first time since the industry began.

This is distressing news as we head into the holiday season. What can the industry do for 2009?

1. Improve incrementally. Test pages and categories at length. Small victories can lead to substantial gains in an economy looking for good news.

2. Improve correspondence. Talk to customers more often. Survey them, get their feedback, respond to their requests and suggestions. Because….

3. UX is king. Any degree of user experience improvement will be welcome at this time, and the easiest place to try harder is in customer service. Flexible, friendly assistance will create good impessions and loyalty, minimizing acquisition costs. And “minimizing costs” is the magic phrase right now.

Techcrunch posted a great item on online video penetration earlier this week. The numbers are both inspiring and sobering.

Among them:

• YouTube is streaming 5 billion videos per month
• Only 4% of those videos support paid advertising
• Online video is generating ad revenue at one-tenth the CPM of television ads
• So far, only 1.4% of video watched by Americans is online
• The online component is expected to double by 2010

As it always has been, video streaming is a great potential resource, but it remains largely potential in nature. Financial aspects will have to catch up to other mediums (or expand greatly in volume) for the industry to become fully viable.

I am pleased to announce the release of Ai’s first whitepaper, Free Shipping: Holiday Hit or Headache. As the title suggests, this paper summarizes the research and opinions across the ecommerce industry about free shipping for the 2008 holiday season.

Following the research is an eight-point list of suggested holiday strategies. We cover free shipping, as expected, as well as discounting, loyalty programs and repeat-purchase incentivization.

Since this is the blog, I can tell you I had great fun researching and writing the whitepaper, and that I have more topics in the works. Look for them here and on the Ai news page in the coming months.

The tech team at Ai is split into two parts. Roughly two-thirds of our staff are developers, the behind-the-scenes programmers and creators of software and rich applications.

The other third are front-end engineers, handling the HTML, CSS, and scripting languages rendered by browsers. Both teams are tight-knit and collaborative, particularly the front-end team.

In this spirit the smaller crew coined itself a little ways back: they are the Fenders, short for “front-enders” (obviously). They take great pride in their work, compete for compliancy accuracy, and play some mean foosball. Most importantly, they work as a team. With a great name.

By extension, the developers are Benders, for back-end, although the term hasn’t made the same impact. The Fenders, on the other hand–or “Fendas,” as our Bronx-style lead Fender likes to say–are really making a name for themselves. Two of our clients have started using it regularly.

The next time you hear about web page creation, don’t think simply in terms of client-side coding or web design. Think: fender.

So quite recently, the Ruby on Rails open source web framework announced that they would be migrating from the Subversion code repository they had to a new one managed by Git.  Git is a version control system created by Linus Torvalds to manage the Linux kernel.  Linus had several requirements in mind when he made Git, requirements that involved specific sets of features, scaleability, stability etc.

My life has been previously sliced up into distinct, and mostly non-overlapping chapters. I’ve lived in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco and New York (and a couple of adjacent suburbs that I won’t get into). In each place there have been a number of people that I’ve known. In time, I’ve moved on and only marginally keep in touch with friends from the old ‘hood. I’m what they used to call a lousy letter-writer.

It’s not so bad. I have great memories from each place, and my life is organized into distinct chunks. I’ve gotten used to the idea of thinking in terms of  ”so-in-so from my former life at location X”. Frozen in time, these memories provide a nice back drop for my identity.

Now, however, Facebook is screwing it all up. My entire life (in people) since high school has all been sucked into Facebook. Everyone I’ve ever known is already there. And they’re all friending me (or I them). Twenty years of time, compressed into nothing.

When yet another mysterious figure from my past “friends” me, I’m suddenly privy to some very disturbing photographs, where I can see the effects of 10 to 20 years of aging all at once. (“Dude, you have no hair! What happened?”) Often they’re accompanied by mysterious young short people in these photographs. Short people that weren’t there before.

I feel like I’ve fallen into a time warp, or maybe am watching my life flash before my eyes. Except it’s the life that I didn’t live, all the paths that I didn’t go down, with people that I didn’t keep in touch with. They’re all back. They’re on Facebook, they’re my friends and they’ve escaped from their neatly delimited chapters in the past to invade my present.

How do you find the information you’re looking for on the Internet? This, of course is the original reason the Web was created – as a publishing platform for the physicists at CERN.

As the web matured, people constructed websites with tree-like structures, viewable as a site map. As web sites grew in size and complexity, we started referring to a large amount of information organized in a tree structure as a taxonomy. Some people (I’m looking at you, Yahoo) tried to taxonomize the entire web. Here’s what we found out about taxonomies: they don’t scale. Once they get too big, they start to collapse under their own weight. Historically it was a mark of a professional that they could navigate a large taxonomy, such as the Dewey Decimal System, or Scientific Classification. I don’t believe that we’ll see many new taxonomies of that scale adopted by the world at large.

So that leads us to search. Search, of course, is the other method we have to find the information we’re looking for, especially when all we want to do is get to the information, and we don’t give a rat’s hiney how it’s catalogued. But since the average search length on Google is something like 1.3 words, we need to infer a tremendous amount of information from very little input.

To me, this seems like a tremendously deep opportunity for the developers of websites to shape how information is presented via the establishment of business rules modeled within search. I call this Search Design, and I see it as a critical part of how websites with large volumes of information should be built.

Search design is currently implemented primarily in terms of how information on a website is indexed. This indexing controls the relative importance of information, and the relative importance of different structures inside the information, and is generally implemented by the developers who built the website.

However, at a higher level, search design is something that can be expressed as a series of business rules. Say you have a newspaper site with articles and authors. You could establish the following business rules for search:

• Articles have higher priority than Authors
• Weight of an article should be, in order of priority: Article Title, Article Author, Article Tags, Article Body.
• Weight of an author should be: Author Name, Author Department, Author Tags, Author Bio

It could be a lot more sophisticated than this of course, it could contain relative numeric values for the indexed values, and the business rules surrounding relative importance of information could also be far more sophisticated.

Search scales. It can handle a LOT of information, but as implemented on individual websites, the presentation of it to date has been relatively naive. Search design could grow to be a profession in itself, much in the same way that information architecture developed over the last decade. For many sites it is search, not a taxonomy structured navigation, that is the primary means of navigation for a website.

A fascinating study was released last week that observed people find expensive items more desirable simply because they’re more expensive. The same bottle of wine is more appealing to consumers who believe it’s worth $90 than others who are told it’s worth $10.

Pricing reactions also rely on contextual cues. Panasonic has found midprice items sell better when shown next to pricier models. The “reference prices” around a product significantly affect their perceived value.

These discoveries are not really new. Consider the make-up artist my wife hired for our wedding five years ago. After agreeing on a price, he forgot what they had decided, and quoted a second rate 80% higher. When my wife expressed shock, he quickly reverted to the original price. He explained that many of his clients were upper-class women who wouldn’t think he was as good a stylist at the rate we were paying. Raising prices actually appeals to his audience, the cost verifying the talent on offer.

These theories are particularly interesting with regard to online merchants. As noted in the New Yorker article, websites create price transparency, which makes for savvier consumers both online and off, and forces retailers to compete in other ways.

The most intriguing question is raised by reading the two articles above as a single unit. In the first, The Economist argues that prices create emotional response, which could be used to sellers’ advantage. In the second, James Surowiecki suggests almost the opposite: that the Internet has eliminated much pricing opacity, creating empowered consumers who understand right-priced items. Observing which one proves more accurate–or whether these theories work in parallel–will help define a generation of sales strategies.