The Bookstore and User Experience
I have been reading a lot of books on user experience lately. This reminded me of a conversation I had long ago with a mentor of mine. Essentially the argument was simple — book selling boils down to providing a great experience for customers that come through the door. It is not complicated it just takes lots of work and attention. According to my friend, a good user experience at a bookstore boils down to the following three things.
- Staff
- Selection
- Merchandising
The staff piece is straightforward. Hire people that like people. Knowing lots about books is a bonus. We have all been frustrated by booksellers that don’t know everything there is to know about your favourite author. You may have been incensed that the employee can’t put a book in your hand when you ask “You know that book with hedgehog in the title that is big right now.” Get over yourself. Bookstore employees can’t read everything and they can’t know everything. If a bookseller thinks they know everything they are harming not helping you deliver a good experience to customers.
Selection is tough. It is the most difficult to do well and it requires the most knowledge and the most time. I think everyone knows implicitly the value of great selection when they are browsing but hardly anyone I have ever met can articulate a strategy for delivering it. The big bookstores try to give shoppers infinite choice. That is not a strategy and that is missing the point. The smaller independents tend to stock what they like and that is not a strategy either. The one model that works reasonably well is to develop a framework for thinking about selection first at the author level, then at the genre level, then at the section level, then at the store level, and then at the neighbourhood level. They all telescope together. It is the Russian-doll theory. It starts with broad strokes. Then an inventory manager needs to apply some rigor to tweak, to edit, or to garden the selection using arcs that are at least a year long. This is a sweet science. In my experience it is perpetually undervalued.
Merchandising is probably the easiest of the three to manage yet you see poorly curated displays all the time. Co-op is partly to blame. Laziness plays a part. But I think over-familarity with the product is the Achilles heel. Bookstore managers need to step back and see their store in the eyes of the customer. They need to disengage from their operation and really think about what stories they are telling, how often, and to who. This starts with basic alphabetizing. It extends to end-caps and tables but it also rolls up to adjacencies and layout choices. I doubt I was the only one that was thrilled to discover McNally Jackson shelving fiction by country-of-origin. Problematic? Absolutely. But it shows they get it. Be interesting. Be interesting often.
How does all this hold up in the internet world? I think it is still valid. The fourth thing I would add is community. Book stores now need to deploy beyond their four walls. Ask how can we expand our footprint with everything we do on the web? Master the staff, the selection, and the merchandising bits in-store and extend them on the web.
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