I’ve been lacking topic matter over the last few weeks. My last post was about a month ago. It’s not that I’ve lost interest in blogging, I’ve just been having trouble coming up with posts that are worth posting. It’s a bit frustrating, but it turns out that it’s solvable…I think.
There are two things that changed recently that could be causing this problem. The first, I’ve been doing some research and prep development for the Mobile Development category I’ve introduced over the last couple of posts. I see it being a nucleus of Blurry Words in which the rest of my garbage orbits around. However, it needs some prep work out of me in order to be useful. So, maybe my mind is wrapped around this and not providing any bandwidth for other random blurs to make there way to my fingers. It’s definitely a possibility but probably not the cause.
I think the more likely reason is that I stopped carrying the notebook that I jot ideas down in. Oops. It wasn’t on purpose. It lives in my laptop bag and we just got new desktop machines in the office, leaving the laptop, and the notebook, next to my couch. Headsmack!
I started taking my notebook with me again this past week. Low and behold, an idea for a post bloomed, and you’re looking at it. Product noise, more specifically filtering that noise. Basically what I’m talking about is the infinite amount of different stuff, different crap that is trying to be sold to us at any given moment of our lives. There’s just too much crap in the world and every item that doesn’t interest us is a barrier to buying the crap that we really want. There needs to be a way for us to avoid the junk that there’s no chance in hell we will ever buy.
This idea came on Thursday, when I felt the need for some new music. Amazon Digital Downloads to the rescue. After downloading a couple of new albums, I started looking through the bargain bin, the albums for $4.99 or less. I’m sure there are some gems in there, I can feel it. The problem is that I have an attention span of about 5 pages. After that I give up and move on to something else. However, there is hundreds of pages that are only sorted by how much they cost. Page 79 could have something right up my ally and I would never know it even existed.
This type of experience isn’t limited to Amazon. I’ve noticed the same thing this weekend as I was searching through realtor listing. I kept having déjà vu moments when viewing houses that I wasn’t interested in the last time I did a search. It makes my search process just that much more painful.
It’s also been a huge complaint in the mobile application space for years now. Take the Amazon example above and factor in huge data charges, slow connections and a tiny little screen and forget the user ever getting to page 5. Page 1 is where the sales are made and beyond that, you might as well not exist. If you add in the fact that only big licensed products get the page 1 placement from the wireless carriers, original IP is a costly, waste of time, even if the application is brilliant.
So, how do we fix this? Well…we can’t. One person’s pile of steaming dog poop is another person’s, “YAY, A PILE OF STEAMING DOG POOP!!!”” (sorry, I’ve been pet-sitting for my parents’ dog this weekend. Dogs are so fascinated by other piles of poo…well, at least this one is). The companies can’t be left to filter out what people want, because they just don’t know. They might know what’s trendy and what’s currently selling well. They may be able to recommend some products based on past purchases, but there is nothing they can do when you get the urge to just browse. There is just no way for them to know what you’re looking for in that situation, but I believe that they could very easily supply the user with the tools to filter out what you aren’t looking for, over time ripping down barriers to purchase.
Back to my Amazon dumpster diving example. What if at the bottom of each page there was a button? I recommend it be labeled Hide This Crap. It would take that pages content and send it to your version of Bizarrazon where every product you couldn’t care less about lives in harmony. I think two things would happen. First, each time a user clicks that button, a small barrier to selling that user something during their future searches is torn down. Instead of looking at the same first 5 pages over and over again, the user now starts from page 6 the next time they’re searching for bargain deals.
Second, I believe this small action would work as a positive reinforcement for the user to continue their search further into the piles of crap. It’s similar in nature to the MMO grind. It’s boring. It’s tedious. However, there is a positive, measurable gain that keeps the user pushing through it. The MMO player levels up their character, allowing them to progress further through the campaign. While the online shopper is creating a filter of crap, which guarantees that their future searching will be that much more streamlined, saving them valuable time.
I can see content creators having a problem with this (though if your content is good you shouldn’t have to worry about it) and I can see stores like Amazon not wanting to cause a rift with their partners. But, the fact is that there is no way in freaking hell that I am going to buy Clapping Songs, by The Hit Crew, the fact that I know it exists is enough. Allow me to filter it from my existence and make it easier for me to spend my money on the stuff that I want to spend it on. How about it?
