Cutting Edge Market Study
Booz Allen Hamilton
In late 1981 leading market research firm Booz-Allen Hamilton decided to test the waters for consumer acceptance of interactive electronic services. But who knew what that meant?
TCS provided interface and interaction design for the Booz-Allen & Hamilton Market Research Team in this highly secret groundbreaking market research study of the potential for online interactive services to the home.
The Value Proposition
Visionary Model
Anticipating the coming electronic revolution, we modeled a full range of integrated consumer services:
- Shopping
- Banking
- Investment Portfolio Management
- Travel Reservations
- Home Finances
- Entertainment
- Home Energy & Security
- Education
- News Retrieval
Prototyping Interactivity
We were able to emulate dynamically integrated services.
For example, a consumer purchase in the "Shopping" section would be reflected by an account debit in the "Banking" section. All the software - for graphics generation, database management, site navigation and applications subroutines - were developed by the team.
As the graphics expert, I designed individual pages for this project, mapped the navigational structure within the site and provided videodisc integration. We overlaid graphics on the videodisc images (not shown here) for various applications, like Home Shopping. The graphics themselves were based on simple character-based images and were built with rudimentary homebrew code.
In spite of numerous obstacles and substantial ignorance, we still managed to capture an early vision of what was to become The Web.