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Videocart, Inc. was a prescient concept that resulted in the world’s first internet B2C startup. By 1992, it operated over 20,000 nodes nationwide on TCP/IP, connecting our Auspex servers to wireless LANs in each of over 200 grocery and chain retailer stores. Every battery-powered, mobile interactive display (like an Etch-A-Sketch™ on shopping carts) received completely new content via download every week, since prices change weekly in grocery stores. Content for grocery stores was sale items and coupons, the same information that was in the local newspaper’s weekly food section, so it was unique for each store. Each device was location-sensitive, displaying only the on-sale items in your immediate vicinity, and changing as you went down the aisle or entered another department. Other pilot sites for Videocart included Wal-Mart and Toys R Us. The Videocart devices in both categories of stores also received several entertainment features for people to use while in the checkout line. Those would now be considered casual games and were popular, as was Headline News from our partnership with USA Today.
The content, or weekly "show," also included what may have been the first banner ads, including animation. Coupons and banner ads were similarly location-specific.
The ATM screen-with-buttons interface was the only public digital interface then in common use, and was Videocart’s model. One difference was motivation; ATMs emit cash if you learn to operate them, but the Videocart devices’ payoff was delayed until checkout and was orders of magnitude smaller. Horoscopes were not acceptable entertainment in some regions, and had to be omitted. Other usability issues were size, color, frame rate, and resolution: it partly blocked the vegetable basket, and it was jet black with “warning orange” buttons that resembled radiation hazard symbols. Screen and animation affordances were limited by a 1-bit, 640x200 pixel display supplied by only one megabyte of RAM.
Clark Dodsworth, Director of Content and Creative Services, built an animation, graphic design, and content production department that worked three shifts, seven days a week, drawing on Chicago’s film and TV commercial production talent and the wealth of local game-graphics programmers and animators. While optimizing the interface for the original system in the midst of rapid growth, we discovered user interface guidelines that apply today to WiFi PDAs and screenphone content design and delivery.
An important accomplishment was gaining management’s approval to redesign of the device. We went to a touchscreen with higher resolution and a mag-stripe reader to enable personalization/CRM database functions: frequent-shopper programs. The new system also had an extraordinary back-end that logged all shopping cart paths and could analyze and playback individual or aggregate paths through a store map. Ultimately, this tied the path data, time-of-day, and day-of-week to effectiveness of sales, coupons, or shelf-placement. That functionality was a dream come true for the company founders, who funded the Videocart startup via their marketing research company that sells family grocery-buying statistics to clients like Procter and Gamble and Nabisco.