COMPAREVIEWS - SYSTEMS DIAGRAM FILTERS REVIEWS
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Rana Chakrabarti | 22.10.09| V1.0
Interpretation CompaReviews enables the Browse-Educate-Compare-Decide balancing loop shown. We take an example of a retail purchase to illustrate system dynamics. Browse: The user, Jane Doe enters the systems via an external trigger, for example a spot bonus leading to disposable income for this month. She is looking for a high-end HD television. This is a specific goal high, at the level of a desire, so has significant momentum. This suggests that Jane Doe will travel further into the system in a single session before leaving to return later. This also means that the goal is intrinsically potent and therefore long-lived. The presence of meaningful filters it an input driver to engaging with the system. For example natural language search which responds to keywords TV, HD and returns a shortlist for further investigation. Educate: This leads to a glut of information. Jane is unprepared and needs time to form an opinion on which HD TV is currently popular and why. i.e. she needs to educate herself on this product category. Meaningful land limited categories drive understanding, since the working memory is limited to 6-8 items. Here she discovers that for the category Television, there are dimensions of tube technology, picture quality, power consumption. She discovers that plasma is by far the better tube technology for picture quality, but has very high power consumption. She decides to trade picture quality for power consumption and fixes LCD as the tube technology Compare: This leads to Comparing all HDTV’s using LCD as the tube technology. She chooses Aspects of Reliability and After Sales Service, in that order.. This reduces her list to 3 HDTV’s. She now chooses to do a face-off between the 3 TV’s. 1 is a clear winner: LG. The information representation changes along with the number of items to keep cognitive resonance. She sees some experts available for HDTV’s. A quick chat confirms positive experiences with the brand and model. Decide: Jane decides to check the model in person to compare her decision. She re-checks her decision with trusted advisors in her social circle. In case this surfaces information which triggers re-thinking, she will re-start the journey, but with greater velocity. In this instance her decision remains unchanged. Jane purchases the LG HDTV. Her experiences with the product encourage her to share it with the community, starting a virtuous cycle Delays : This suggests that experience is intrinsically discontinuous. A key function of the system is serve a “pause button” where the end-user can pickup where she left off in the last session