This study focuses on innovative ways to digitally instrument the servicescape in bricksand-mortar retailing. In the present digital era, technological developments allow for augmenting the shopping experience and capturing moments-of-truth along the shopper's path-to-purchase. This article provides an encompassing inventory of cutting-edge retail technologies resulting from a systematic screening of three secondary data sources, over 2008-2014: (1) the academic marketing literature, (2) retailing related scientific ICT publications, and (3) related business practices (e.g., publications from retail labs and R&D departments). An affinity diagram approach allows for clustering the retail technologies from an HCI perspective and categorizing the technologies in terms of the type of customer value that they offer, and the stage in the path-to-purchase they mainly pertain to. This in-depth analysis results in a comprehensive inventory of innovative retail technologies that allows for verifying the suitability of new technologies for targeted in-store shopper marketing objectives (cf. www.retail-tech.org to consult the resulting online repository, using faceted search). The results of the analyses indicate that the majority of the inventoried technologies provide utilitarian value, whereas few offer hedonic benefits. Moreover, at present the earlier stages of the path-to-purchase appear to be the most instrumented. The article concludes with a research agenda.
In this paper we show how an interactive system can be distributed among several peer devices. By taking advantage of the current trend towards ambient intelligent environments, we can make use of a combination of computing resources in the surrounding of the user to function as one logical interactive system; an interaction space. Our approach relies on the fact that nowadays most computing resources are network-enabled and publish their device profile using some special-purpose protocol. For this reason, federations of devices that support the tasks of the user can be composed automatically according to the requirements of these tasks. This distribution of the user interface over a federation of devices can be local or non-local. It raises the opportunity for supporting collaborative tasks with the same user interface with little or no extra effort from the user interface designer. Future tools supporting the design, creation and deployment of distributed interactive systems using device federations should maintain usability and usefulness of a dynamic distributed system. We use two different metrics to cope with these problems: interface completeness and interface continuity.
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