While evaluating a new eCommerce solution one must pay close attention to Online/Offline integration capabilities. In today’s distributed computing world, real-time and perpetual connectivity with your back office systems is critical.

In this post, I want to concentrate on the integration of online commerce platforms with in-store Point of Sale systems. Obviously, Online/Offline integration goes well beyond that. ERP, Warehouse fulfillment, supply logistics and Accounting Systems are all great examples of Online/Offline integration platforms. However, for brevity and simplicity I will concentrate here on POS alone.

Many traditional “Brick and Mortar” retailers have expanded their reach to the online community with an eCommerce platform (often called Online Shopping Cart).

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My team in New York recently redesigned the public website for T. Rowe Price – www.troweprice.com - a leading global investment organization.

We engaged in a process that we have implemented successfully for 100’s of websites, both public and private.  It follows our user centered design methodology and begins with goal setting.  The main goal of the new site is to serve as a gateway that provides users quick and accurate access to the underlying sites for each line of business while providing a strong brand representation that is in line with T.Rowe Price objectives.

Once the main goals were established we continued with a comprehensive competitive analysis to assess T. Rowe Price’s existing corporate website against its industry peers as well as other best in class public websites.  We gained valuable insight about features, nomenclature, and site organization by looking at both financial and non-financial sites.   Once complete this solidified the need for improvement and helped to validate assumptions and decisions impacting the proposed redesign.

We then engaged with both internal business stakeholders and target users to refine objectives and align those objectives with audience behavior.  This alignment was reflected in a new information architecture that achieves ease-of-use and content delivery objectives while allowing users to quickly move to the right destination site. Once the information architecture was complete then the visual design team took over and brought the wireframes to life by creating a new visual design that better represented the T.Rowe Price brand.

The ultimate result of this process was an updated user experience that improved brand identity, enhanced site usability, and showcased T. Rowe Price more effectively to its site users. Everyone involved in the process were extremely satisfied with the results.

Written by Mike Matteo