One thing I have always been interested in is omni-channel crossover and how the web can be used as a customer facing tool in a retail environment or to aid associates assisting shoppers face-to-face.
So much of the content that ends up on a website could be extremely beneficial to shoppers who go in store to shop, and tying together what they see online and in store has the potential to greatly improve the overall customer experience.
Several years ago, I was asked to consider how we might take the content of a website we were making for a new product line and create an interactive retail experience for our customers to engage with. There were very specific budgets and the work also included creating the overall technical solution.
- What device(s) would be used in each retail location?
- How would we handle spotty internet connections?
- How would content get updated across the locations?
- How would theseexperiences be installed with limited technical knowledge in store?
In the end, we landed on a simple website, viewed on a locked, full-screen browser of an iPad in a custom kiosk display unit. The site itself could be cached and updating the content would be as simple as deploying changes to the web server and asking each location to refresh their iPad's.
This also allowed us to re-use much of the content as it was created for the product website, speeding up the time to market, adding omni-channel consistency, and reducing design time and cost.