Abstract

What kinds of content—information and interactive mechanisms—should businesses put online? Existing online businesses are driven largely by metaphors of the web as ‘online catalog brochure’. Clearly, such a limited approach under-utilizes the interactive capabilities of online technologies. In this paper, we argue that successful businesses have likely evolved non-obvious ‘offline’ practices that can be translated to online practices. We show how such practices can be uncovered by observing representational activity in a business. Specifically, we introduce a distributed-cognition based method for analyzing representational activity in terms of the movement of information across media, which enables us to systematically explore the space of potential interactive mechanisms. We demonstrate our method on a successful small business that would not at first appear to benefit from online content beyond that provided by the catalog metaphor. The analysis revealed several novel interactive mechanisms, including a product expert that personalizes a combination of products based on customer-specified problems, and a mechanism that automatically calculates product consumption rates, sending customers e-mail reminders to repurchase products near the end of their life span.

Author Keywords: Business-consumer interaction; Systematic observational methods; Management and information systems design; Distributed cognition

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Businesses as cognitive systems

3. Analyzing a business as a cognitive system for information technology purposes

4. Business background: Hair Crafters

4.1. Typical operation

5. Step 1: identify products

6. Step 2: model representations and representational activity

6.1. The haircut

6.2. Hair care products

6.3. The reminder card

7. Step 3: diagnose computational opportunities

7.1. The key diagnosis operations: How to put the haircut online

7.1.1. Style specification: exploring substitutions of technology for storage media–bridging technologies and activity isomorphs

7.1.2. Style specification: exploring substitutions of technology for people—changing transduction channels and adopting new activities

7.1.3. Detail specification: exploring substitutions of technology for multiple agents

7.2. Implementing a diagnosis: how to put hair care products online

7.2.1. Diagnosis

7.2.2. Implementation

7.3. Analogical diagnosis: how to put reminders online

7.3.1. Applying the reminder diagnosis to hair care products: substituting content

8. Conclusion

References