Leading Edge Market Study
(3 mo.)
In late 1981 leading market research firm Booz-Allen Hamilton decided to test the waters for consumer acceptance of interactive electronic services. But who knew what that meant?
TCS provided interface and interaction design for the Booz-Allen & Hamilton Market Research Team in this highly secret groundbreaking market research study of the potential for online interactive services to the home.
Visionary Model
Anticipating the coming electronic revolution, we modeled a full range of integrated consumer services:
- Shopping
- Banking
- Investment Portfolio Management
- Travel Reservations
- Home Finances
- Entertainment
- Home Energy & Security
- Education
- News Retrieval
We prototyped a potential future integrated dynamic electronic consumer service by bringing together video, computer graphic images, and a touch-sensitive screen - all delivered through a personal computer. That was cutting edge stuff - in 1981.
Prototyping Interactivity
We were able to emulate dynamically integrated services.
For example, a consumer purchase in the "Shopping" section would be reflected by an account debit in the "Banking" section. All the software - for graphics generation, database management, site navigation and applications subroutines - were developed by the team.
As the graphics expert, I designed individual pages for this project, mapped the navigational structure within the site and provided videodisc integration. We overlaid graphics on the videodisc images (not shown here) for various applications, like Home Shopping. The graphics themselves were based on simple character-based images and were built with rudimentary homebrew code.
In spite of numerous obstacles and substantial ignorance, we still managed to capture an early vision of what was to become The Web.
This was a real "chewing gum & rubber bands" exercise. No one had ever pulled together anything like this - or asked "the Big Questions" about customer acceptance and adoption of interactive new media technology. Truly cutting edge.
“I want to thank you for the very professional and creative job you did for Booz-Allen in database design and computer graphics screen creation for the Home Information Systems simulator. Your expertise in graphics and interactive video contributed significantly to the overall quality of the system. In addition, your dedication to getting the job done, including your suggestions on improving our software tools, were greatly appreciated. I thoroughly enjoyed working with you and hope to have the opportunity to do so again.”
George P. Lilly, BOOZ-ALLEN & HAMILTON, Inc.
I developed character-based graphics sets for all pages "by hand".