21 Mar 2007 0846H

Mass customization: my client, and also, Blurb

We’re rolling out a mass customization “builder-type” application for my client, who shall for the time being remain nameless, in which I played the role of interaction designer, a role I find I enjoy more than, say, sitting in the National Archives for six months, four to six hours each day, poring over dusty, sooty records in order to create a taxonomy or a controlled vocab for romanization of Chinese names in Toisaan and Cantonese, which I did back in 2003 to finish my MA. Anyway, I believe the client team is seeing it for the first time this week, which I think we’re all eager to do. We want to play with the thing! Let’s have at it!

It’s been a while since I designed interaction and IA on a scale this big, for millions of consumers. The first time, well, you can see as this 2002 entry from Jared Spool about the credit and appliance sections of Sears.com, which I worked on. In my defense back then, the seducible moment just wasn’t part of the requirements, and organizations can be large and cumbersome with many factions, so, these things sometimes get left out in the rush with a business sponsor to get up online. But the seducible moment is coming back in a big way here as I’m working on another part of the client business, so, there’s no excuse this time!

Blurb was featured in the Money section of USA Today this morning in a pretty glowing article that talks about their mass customization offering. It is pretty sexy! I haven’t pulled the trigger on ordering a book from Blurb yet, but in the course of benchmarking various tools out there, I’ve played around with it. Even though it’s a downloadable application rather than web based, I find it’s pretty good, I even started to notice the emergence of design pattern language conventions around these types of builder-type applications. The price point is very competitive, which is awesome, but the real question is the quality of the print artifact. Evidently it’s doing well enough to generate thousands of orders each day now, up from hundreds a few months ago. Definitely check it out if you do this type of photo book stuff. I don’t take enough photos often enough to make this make sense for me, but I’ll blog about these kinds of tools soonish. Indeed, everything old is new again. Micropublishing has been made easy, exciting, and possible once more. Go visit Blurb.

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