Are We Ready Yet?

Web ready? There must be some simple process to make sure that all this product data is stored somewhere, so that we can access it it when we’re rendering product content on sun.com? No? Ah. But there is a process. There’s a few.

Designing interactivity based on product taxonomies is really interesting stuff. There’s a number of ways you can slice the data which enables you to present compelling experiences that drive to conversion. It’s even more interesting when you’re designing on an assumption of what those taxonomies look like, rather than what they actually look like. There is a point up to which you can make sensible design decisions, based of top-level and subcategory branching, for example, but there does come another point where, without the data, you really don’t know whether you can entertain alternate experiences, through, say, filtering across common product attributes. If you don’t know what attributes there are, you don’t know if they are common.

But designers like challenges. The challenge is often to get folks to lust after the design so much that they’ll give you whatever you want. I’m asking for the data.

Listening Post: Public Image: Public Image