Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables, an exceptional product line from Intermarché.

Designed to reduce produce waste.

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This has been a long time coming for Chris and the rest of the Unata team and we want to congratulate them on all the hard work that went into this launch.

Just over two years ago we were designing mockups for Unata which included Longo’s content and marketing as an aspirational goal. And now that goal has been realized. Amazing!

Available on Google Play and the App Store.

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Product-free retail is interesting, but not as exciting as QR-code-free automated retail.

There’s still the point with QR codes where they don’t really work with produce, fragrances, or other things you want to touch and feel. And they’re slow for consumers. If you want to give all that up, you’d be better off shopping online and saving the trip to the store along with the patience and arm strain of photographing everything.

Both Toshiba and Fujitsu are working on automating the checkout process with smarter scanners.

Fujitsu has its ominous looking tunnel, with a conveyor belt that moves products almost 3 times faster than a traditional grocer checkout, all completely automated.

Meanwhile, Toshiba is using a more traditional scanner (as pictured above) with just enough smarts to read objects without worrying about scanning bar codes or inputting produce codes.

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Sadly, using barcodes as the method of tossing items into your shopping cart seems rather convoluted, but it’s an interesting first step. It would be much easier to touch and go than have to hold up your phone and align it to QR codes. QR codes, of course, mean you can just plaster a wall with a decal and you’re pretty much done, so it’s an easy step technically, if not entirely user friendly (I am no fan of QR codes — at the very least, let the user photograph the product, not a code).

Pretty cool, at any rate.

Update

Mavis Huntley with a first hand review.

Highlights:

A nice surprise was that there was free Wi-Fi in the space. It’s the attention to detail that go along way in executing technically advanced ideas.

I was surprised to find out that the experience of scanning items was also easy to use. I didn’t have to align the scanner exactly to the QR codes, which was good since some of the shelves were out of reach.

Alas, Marina Strauss reports, along my own line of thinking:

Still, while mobile retail is about to boom, the jury is still out on the use of QR codes, said Kaan Yigit, president of Solutions Research Group. Only 20 per cent of Canadian smartphone owners use them; those people are generally male and over half the users are under 30, he said.

For the virtual-store idea to work, shoppers first need to install the app and then use a QR code. “Unless what they are selling is highly exclusive or unique, there are just easier ways to buy the same thing – either at brick and mortar stores or online.”

Photo via marketingmag.ca.

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Visiting most e-commerce sites you’ll see a form like this on checkout:

It’s pretty straight-forward and simple, but we can refine it a little further by auto-detecting which credit card the user has entered, rather than asking them to specify it manually.

So how’s it done? Every credit card type has a specific number (or 2 numbers) that it starts with. Visa always starts with 4, American Express uses 34 & 37 and Mastercard uses 51-55. You can find a full list including other cards over at Wikipedia.

Pair a simple javascript with some pretty icons and you’ll have a form that looks great and simplifies the user checkout process.

Here’s an example of the finished form.

If you shop around the internet, you’ll notice that many sites have started doing this kind of credit card detection. It’s a simple adjustment and a great way to take away another task the user has to do.

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301 Front Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5V 2T6
Canada

This is all well and good when mailing a letter, but it presents a problem of hierarchy when used in a web form. The specific issue is with the order of the province, country and postal code.

Here’s how you’d generally find these fields organized in a standard checkout form.

So what’s the problem? For starters, every country has different regions (provinces, states, neither, etc.) but the user is being asked to specify which region they live in, before they’ve even decided what country they live in. This creates an issue where the user has to click or tab down past the region field, choose a country, then navigate back up to select their region.

We can make this process a whole lot simpler for the user by putting the country field before the region field, allowing the user to specify their country first. This may then update the form (using javascript) to display the applicable states or provinces for their country. This also gives the us the opportunity to update field labels to their proper values by country. For example, in Canada we have provinces and a postal code in place of states and a zip code.

Just like that we’ve made things a little easier for users. We can take it further, if you’re feeling a little more ambitious. It’s possible to determine the user’s city, province and country using their postal/zip code. To do this, you’d simply put the postal code before the city, province and country fields, and then evaluate it with Javascript which can automatically populate the following fields.

If you’re dealing with a North American audience, we can easily determine if a user is from Canada or the USA by detecting whether their postal/zip code begins with a number (USA) or a letter (Canada). This may throughly confuse your international shoppers, as people from the UK would be told they’re from Canada, but if you’re running a local delivery service, this would be useful.

Let’s focus on the Canadian postal code system first, because it’s nicely structured, and neat how much information you can gather from it.

Using the first letter alone, we can determine what province a user is from. In fact, the entire M designation is for Toronto alone. So if a user enters M, we know immediately they’re in Toronto, and can fill in the city.

Other locations are simple to figure out as well. We’ll simply need to reference the first 3 characters of the postal code, for example, L3Y & L3X are both postal codes for Newmarket.

A simple javascript object could be referenced to return the relevant data about a postal code. This process is nifty, and saves the user time when purchasing a product from your website. You can hop over to Wikipedia and check out a listing of all the active Canadian postal codes, and their respective provinces and cities.

Zip codes in the USA don’t seem as structured. For example, a zip code with the first digit of 1 could be the state of Delaware, New York or Pennsylvania. We can’t determine what state the user lives with a single digit alone, however, we can decypher that they live in the USA, so we can set the country, and update the region list, changing the label to “State” and populating the drop-down.

I don’t know enough about zip codes, but there is likely a pattern in the first few digits that would allow you to calculate what state the user lives in. You can find out more about zip codes at Wikipedia.

It is possible to use this technique for Canadian and American customers when you’re also serving international customers. The best way to do that would be to ask for the country first, then the postal code. That way you can be sure you’re suggesting the right information for the right country.

Be aware, if you decide to use a technique like this on your site, it’s very important to allow users to change your suggested responses. Why? The trouble with making a system smarter is that smart things often make dumb mistakes. There are going to be fringe cases that you can’t account for. For example, H0H 0H0 is the postal code for Santa Claus, but if you punched in H our system would assume you live in Quebec. These fringe cases drive users insane Make users upset when they can’t manually override them.

My personal encounter with such a system involves the Swiss Chalet online ordering system. For some reason, it thinks I live in Stouffville (which I don’t), and I can’t change it. I’ve learned to live with it, since my food always arrives, but the first time I ordered, it was very confusing and frustrating that I couldn’t set my city to Toronto manually.

It’s these little touches that will help make the experience of using your website a whole lot more exciting (yes, exciting!!) for your users. When a user gets to think less about using your site, they can focus a lot more on getting value from your content and services.

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