Enhancing E-Experiences by 360 degrees

Fond as they are of extolling the virtues of an ever-enhanced online experience, web design specialists everywhere are jumping on the chance to enrich our lives with increasingly personalised and more visually appealing web offerings. Analysts point to the greatest growth areas for new features being mobile commerce, URL/widget sharing, personalised messaging and user ratings. Remember, these are mostly analysts paid by web development specialists to report on developments on the Internet – but those growth areas sound pretty accurate don’t they?

With this area in mind, I picked up on a quantitative survey released this week by Scene7 (a division of Adobe) based on 347 respondents from retailers, manufacturers, agencies and high-tech companies worldwide that sell a wide variety of products and services online.

Top-ranking features and functionalities identified by respondents included: alternate views, user ratings, videos, blogs, product tours, online catalogues, personalised messaging, quick looks and personalised stores. No major surprises there right?

Twenty-five percent of the respondents said they have deployed the following features and functionalities, which they ranked as equally effective: microsites, videos, online catalogs, personalised stores, blogs, colour swatching, quick looks, RSS and product tours. More interesting? Yes I think so.

But perhaps most interesting of all, respondents indicated that one of the most highly-effective features for online business is a 360-degree image spin (to allow users to look all around a product), which the survey found to be not yet widely deployed. Subsequently, nearly 30 per cent of respondents plan to add 360-degree spin functionality to their sites in 2008.