Variable Markup

I’m giving Bestbuy.com a C+ for their holiday widget strategy this holiday season.  They provided two widgets, one in the form of Yahoo Widgets for your desktop and the second for igoogle.  Both are identical in look and functionality.  The visual design was well done, although the functionality came up short IMO.  Details below.

This is the first view of the widget which allows you to add holidays that you are planning for.  I added Christmas and Valentines day.  It then also allows you to take notes for each of the holidays you have added to your list.

Some of the things I would have liked to have seen here:

• Selection of holidays that I can add with one click. 
• In Context highlighting in the notes, so when I type in a note like  ”find Wii for Christmas”, it would automatically hyperlink the Wii or other known keywords to landing pages or the item itself. 
• Countdown to the next holiday date as well as countdown to the important days for ordering such as last day to order with standard shipping. 

The second view is called Experiences.  This one didn’t add much to the experience unfortunately.  It provided a few major categories of experiences you could have, with a few items in each that jump to the item on the web.  I would have liked to see the capability to add some profile information to the widget for my wife and kids including age and interests and it would provide back intelligent ideas.  I didn’t see much method to the madness here except what they wanted to promote. 

The third tab is “Week’s Picks”.  Oddly though it defaults to a map icon.   Clicking on the map icon prompts for your zip and it then launches the store locator in a browser window.   This was useful as a shortcut, but it’s not something I would use over and over.  Selecting a category on the left brought up promoted items in that category that linked to the item page on the web. 

To make this really useful:

• It would have been great to be able to add in my own wishlist of items and have it figure out what store had all or most of the items in stock. 
• Further on that train of thought, I could add an item like a Wii, and an alarm would go off letting me know the moment a shipment of Wii’s were coming in. 
• Last, with the wishlist, I would have liked to be able to set other alarms for when products go more than x% off or for $y price or below.   I think this information coming back into the merchandising team would be really interesting as you could analyze for the hot products and at what price points people were looking to obtain them for.    Almost a soft commit Priceline for retail products. 

Last is a standard search of their Internet site.   Nothing special.

This is the igoogle widget.  Same look and feel, but in your browser.

The uh-oh button was a great idea and reminded me of Friendlyware in the early 80’s with the bosskey that would escape out of a game to a screen that looked like work.  Unfortunately, Bestbuy’s implementation was just an exe that you put on your desktop forcing you to minimize/move your browser so you could find the icon and launch it.  I would suspect that most people that downloaded and tried it, had no idea what they were supposed to do with it.  A better implementation would have been in the webpage itself and when clicked it have taken the consumer to another page that looked like real work.  A whole ad campaign could have been made out this and would have appealed to many of the techies around. 

Overall it was a good effort, but it could have been a real driver of loyalty if implemented further with functionality that provided more value. 

Spacedog and Avenue A/Razorfish built the front & backend.  You can download the widgets at Bestbuy.com.

Tags: experience, holiday season, maps, store locator, widgets, wishlist, yahoo