Monday, February 27, 2006

The Cloned Hypertext Retailers

The technology of the Internet, while in constant flux, paradoxically causes confusion while it facilitates social shifts in social, temporal and spatial boundaries as it integrates online and offline culture. One of these shifts is the ability to buy and sell without boundaries.

So along with hundreds of other UK furniture businesses, we decided to open an Internet shop. And here we are, paradoxically pointing out the difficulties of online shopping. Marcus thinks we shouldn’t post it at all – we are supposed to be giving potential shoppers incentives to buy furniture from us, not bombard them with negative verbal diarrhea about it.

We’ve cloned a shop like every other online shop, which is a clone of a bricks and mortar shop. It has a homepage – the shop entrance – a menu which neatly divides our products into categories or departments, a customer service section, a little bit about us and the obligatory terms and conditions. Once the shopper gets to the products, they find them all laid out in alphabetical order, in rows and columns of boxes, and the additional details are long paragraphs of text. We had to accept the limitations of the software – the same software used by countless other online shops. The software which imitates other e-commerce software. Paraphrasing Jean Baudrillard: in our postmodern Disneyfied culture, which is much concerned with cloning, what is real is becoming blurred. In fact, representations of reality are copying reality, and even taking over reality – becoming hyperreality.

The prefix hyper can be applied to varied linguistic combinations. So what’s the connection between hyperreality and hyperlinking? Hyperlinks have the ability to link information without necessary order or hierarchy. We are going to use the term hyperlink as a generic term to refer to any kind of connected information with which a user can interact by clicking on it. Hyperlinking facilitates multiple realities, since links can be revisited from different points each time. Although hypertext allows users to control the web-based environment they visit, hyperlinks may be an obstruction. The potential for non-linear navigation causes disorientation, which means most users who happen to click on a link to our hyperreal, multi-reality shop, will leave without even making an effort to look around, thus missing all the good stuff hiding behind the hyperlinks.

Two of the most used media for hyperlinking on shop webpages are text and graphics. Throughout history, graphic representations have been more popular than text because they are more concrete. But if we just put up images of our products, without explaining them, that wouldn’t give enough information, so we’re in the process or writing reams of textual descriptions. Hopefully our shoppers will not be doomed to a dull, tedious, textual web-based shopping experience – well at least not since Marcus’s humour started kicking in. But they might leave due to technostress - frustrated and frozen by their inability to decide where to start: How to make choices about what to click on.

In order to benefit from an online shopping experience, a user needs to be able to interpret visual clues, be willing to explore, and make choices. Even if Information Architecture is used to support shoppers in navigating the seemingly chaos of hyperlinks, it cannot be counted on. What makes sense to the shop developer may not make sense to shoppers, because it is based on someone else’s reality.

These first few days of initial blogging have put us into an alternative mindset. We are going to avoid being cloned hypertext retailers, but are still fuzzy about how to accomplish it.

Tamara and Marcus

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