BlueLight Special

Baldwin Louie — Mon, 05 Mar 2001 14:00:00 -0800

Kmart (KM) has never been cool. But with its spinoff BlueLight.com, the 39-year-old retailer has proved that it may be getting hip to the Net.

The company's original Web site barely made an impression on e-commerce watchers - or customers - after its debut in 1995. Rather than renovate the struggling Kmart.com, however, the company started fresh late in 1999, designing and building a new site from scratch, and in true dot-com fashion: getting outside funding, working like crazy to meet an unrealistic deadline and then turning it on and tweaking.

The new BlueLight.com (dossier)has become one of the few positive e-commerce stories, drawing more than 3 million visitors this holiday season. There are lessons in how Kmart got its groove back that can help any organization designing a new site.

LESSON 1: DESIGNING A MAJOR-LEAGUE WEB SITE TAKES SERIOUS CASH.
Kmart executives created a separate interactive division to secure venture funding, and after shopping around they partnered with Softbank. They were taken with the ideas of Softbank entrepreneur-in-residence Mark Goldstein, who, after arranging the $62.5 million deal, jumped over to BlueLight as CEO. "I'm a big fan of the traditional startup environment," he says. Which is why he pushed everyone to have the site up and running within six months.

LESSON 2: GET EXPERIENCED HELP - ESPECIALLY IF THE DEADLINE IS TIGHT.
Goldstein began running his plans for BlueLight by potential hires in December 1999. His first recruit was Brian Sugar, who as VP of interactive built J.Crew's award-winning Web store. Goldstein then brought in 40 design consultants from Fort Point Partners (dossier) to set up procedures, select technology providers and integrate systems. Fort Point, in turn, brought in design firm Addwater to develop design concepts. Goldstein soon signed on Mark Danzig as VP of design - another J.Crew expatriate who'd also done a one-year stint at L.L.Bean. Not long after, Goldstein dumped Addwater, preferring to develop the design in-house. Goldstein explains that he wanted a design that would invoke Kmart's brand, including the company's love of primary colors. "We don't speak fuchsia here," he quips.

LESSON 3: DO YOUR HOMEWORK.
In a dark, dingy San Francisco office above a Brooks Brothers (dossier) outlet, Goldstein spent hours in front of a whiteboard brainstorming with his staff and consultants about what the site's look and feel should be. Using Adobe Illustrator, they mapped out all the possible pathways through the site, what would appear on every page, the sequence of links, options within pull-down menus, interactive features and transactions.

"We spent a lot of time on things like checkout, navigation and search," recalls Danzig. These issues were complicated by the sheer variety of BlueLight's planned inventory. "You need to know size and color for apparel, but not for CDs," says Danzig. "It's a big challenge to design something that's a coherent experience while using the navigation style that's optimal for each type of product."

Correction:
This article included inaccurate information about Kmart and its spinoff, BlueLight.com. Kmart is a 102-year-old retailer. The contract between BlueLight and design firm Addwater ended at an agreed-upon point. Holiday traffic for BlueLight.com during November and December 2000 was 8.5 million, according to Media Metrix.

User-interface flowcharts went through several grueling rewrites before finally being printed out for the growing ranks of design, coding and production staff, who by this time were sitting four to a card table. Designers wielded Macromedia (MACR)'s Flash to create animation, Adobe's Photoshop to digitize product shots, Adobe's ImageReady to touch up the images and Illustrator to lay out pages complete with text and design.

Meanwhile, Fort Point consultants set up network hardware from Sun Microsystems (SUNW) and installed software - including personalization tools from Art Technology Group (ARTG) and Epiphany - and customer service and fulfillment systems from SubmitOrder.com.

LESSON 4: MEETINGS CAN BE HELL - BUT USEFUL.
Both the design and engineering camps followed the user-interface plans closely, and the groups discussed their progress in regular meetings - much-resented get-togethers that, on top of the regular status reports that had to be generated, added hours to the staff's already long work week. But the upside was that the project stayed on track. "We had 17 different trains all having to arrive back at the station three months later," says Fort Point VP John Strain. "That's the importance of program management."

Once the code and layouts were complete, they were married by production staff and Fort Point consultants, who wove everything together as specified in the user-interface maps. They converted all of the page layouts to HTML and then debugged the site, checking for design and usability problems. By June, a public test site went live on the Web with a caveat that it was a work in progress.

LESSON 5: YOU'RE NEVER DONE.
It didn't take long for the tweaking to begin. "We discovered that a lot of people were entering search requests into the box asking for e-mail addresses," Danzig recalls. "So we moved the two as far apart as we could."

During this period, the company bade farewell to Brooks Brothers and moved to bright blue offices above the Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf. As employees settled in, they worked on one last round of revisions - and then one more last round of revisions.

Most of their efforts were focused on improving the user experience. For instance, the E.piphany (EPNY) software indicated that consumers clicked on promotions the most. To free up space for more of these offerings, BlueLight changed its vertical menu bar on the left side of the page to a horizontal bar positioned near the top of the screen.

BlueLight.com had its grand opening last October. But Goldstein and his crew still aren't finished. They've already scheduled major site revisions for March, June and October of this year, and each upgrade will repeat the entire launch process.

The latest tweak is the resurrection of Kmart's famous blue-light special. Banners in the menu bar touting weekly promotions were already being used, and now, at timed intervals, a screen pops up offering a discount coupon. In the next upgrade, the specials will be personalized for each customer, and a blue-light icon will flash. Regarded as an anachronism from retailing past, the flashing blue light went dark in Kmart stores in 1992.

This time around, however, it's going to seem a whole lot hipper.

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BlueLight Special