(Bridging the online and offline worlds. Get it?)

As digital technologists, we work to identify simple solutions to (sometimes) complex business problems. And one of the most challenging business problems is connecting the web to the offline world.

In our daily job, we follow a straight forward (and rather scientific) process to solve these kinds of problems:

• Identify the problem
• Propose potential solutions (hopefully there’s more than one!)
• Identify ways of measuring the impact of solution
• Implement a solution
• Track the effect of the solution for a set period of time
• Review the effect and refine (as necessary)

As you can see, the process is obviously simple which is great! But there’s the unfortunate hurdle of testing our solution. You see, we need a controlled environment to make sense of the results. And when it comes to the online/offline problem, the environment is NOT controlled and this makes our experiment rather complex.

How is that so?

Let’s take the idea of trying to improve the user experience on eCommerce websites (NOTE: this scenario was actually a topic of conversation at the latest AiMA event). If we wanted to measure the impact of changes to our shopping cart, we would deal with the following scenarios:

• The user may need to temporarily leave the site. In this scenario, a user that’s looking to purchase a high definition (HD) television from Best Buy may start at the website but then swing over to an advice site such as Engadget to review the latest offerings before returning to the Best Buy website. In this scenario, we could determine that the user left our site but the Engadget destination would be invisible.
• The user may use an offline environment to complete the task. In this scenario, a user may come to BestBuy.com to look up the price of the HD television but, because of security concerns, physically go to the store to complete purchase.

In the two scenarios above, we could measure user paths, entries and exits but we would only get a partial view into the complete picture (IOW, maybe the user is not quite ready to make that purchasing decision). Clearly, we need a way to bridge the online environment with the offline world. But how are we going to accomplish this?

Well, there are several (semi-elegant) ways to connect these two environments but you’ll have to wait to Part II for these solutions.

Happy thinking!