We’ve all heard about the day when ubiquitous computing will transform the lives of everyone who is immersed in daily physical world activity, at least in the digitally connected world. I also imagine a day when I’m talking to my grandchildren about desktop computing as a hobby, social networking as a giant online community experiment, and leather wallets as erstwhile artifacts of real-world financial transacting at retail.
While pure digital retail settings have advanced to a point of extreme shopping efficiency, there’s a lot of room for improving the digital shopping experience in the physical/mobile/social retail space.
What are some simple steps that bring ubiquitous computing closer to the physical shopping experience? I can think of a few scenarios that shouldn’t seem too outlandish:
- My smartphone’s ability to handle ALL of my financial activities at register (the technology exists, but all dots are not yet connected, at least not in the U.S.);
- “At register” becoming any physical point in the store (thank you, Apple. I’d like to know if this has helped in-store sales and productivity–it still feels weird as a customer);
- My mobile (smartphone) camera’s ability to conduct real-time informational reconnaissance on core product information, at the retail shelf by image and/or barcode recognition (Google Goggles is still perfecting the imaging technology); and
- The instantaneous ability to read and react to peer reviews of the product (Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla are progenitors for social mobile real-time peer influence).
These simple evolutions for retail customer experience in the physical world seem reasonable and doable. But what business, technology, infrastructure and user experience hurdles need to be cleared to apply them in a meaningful, value-added way that makes sense for the user experience?