The other key cultural misunderstanding has been in online shopping behaviour. Mine was a simple requirement. One product only. It was a business-to-business context, where the item price was high, and no requirement for multiple purchases exists. This too is contrary to the intuitive “shopping” experience.
The thought that one might grab a wire shopping trolley, and push it through the door of Alfred Dunhill of London, wheeling it between the oak humidors and the gold cufflinks, merrily chucking items into the cart – is ludicrous. And so it should be on a website that has the same market positioning. A discreet button here and there to allow the viewer to purchase without inconvenience, should be available – but it should not be a big, loud orange badge with the PayPal logo emblazoned on it. Nor should it be thrust in the viewer’s face like some spruiker’s hoarding. Wording such as “Add to Cart” and “View cart” no more have a place on this website than they would at Alfred Dunhill. However, such was not the world experience of my Chinese developers. I should not have anticipated that they had experienced the same influences as I, nor should I have expected them to interpret my brief through the same eyes. The failing was theirs, but the responsibility was mine, through the naïveté of my expectations.
The e-commerce function I am looking for includes the automatic generation of a tax invoice, emailed to the purchaser, in recognition that this is a business purchase. I also require discreet product branding on the payment site, and a simple purchase function that does not include the multitude of steps needed for a multiple-product, supermarket shopping experience.
Given the value of the item, I am looking for confirmation that the online financial transaction has succeeded before releasing the product. The product itself takes the form of a digital download; a .pdf of 9Mb. The download process requires specific tools and confirmation of receipt, as well as measures to prevent undesirable replication. I decided this was too foreign a concept for my development team. I’ll sort that out elsewhere.
Lesson: We are each the sum of our accumulated experiences. Some people, who spend their lives shopping in supermarkets and department stores, never have the opportunity to encounter the intimately personal experience of a one-on-one bespoke transaction. It sounds elitist and condescending even to discuss it in this way. And yet, we are really talking about aspirational positioning; about creating a market position for a product that might, by its nature, be beyond the experience of the prospective buyer - but is, nevertheless, an experience to which they aspire.
Therefore, our designers and developers must, at the least, be able to conceive of that positioning, to have experienced that positioning, even vicariously, through having seen others experience it. They need to be able to understand it, in some measure, in order to be able to replicate the market postioning. Without some degree of identification with the positioning, developers cannot distinguish between 'buying behaviour' and 'shopping behaviour'; between a business-to-consumer transaction and a business-to-business transaction. And so the implications arise of shopping carts in Alfred Dunhill, of 'checkouts' in place of discrete private transactions - and of designers who simply cannot conceive of the difference - or understand what all the fuss is about.
