Interview: Ron Pompei, Pompei AD

Apr 26, 2005

Authenticity is an essential ingredient of good experience. It separates the superficial from the substantial; the soulless from the humane; the isolated from the integrated; the false from the true. It's a big idea worth exploring.

But I'll admit that authenticity can be a tricky thing to pin down. (Anyone want to take a crack at "What is truth?") In fact it's so elusive that I've heard some speakers on experience-design suggest that authenticity doesn't even exist, and so we should proceed (in customer experience, design, and other fields) without it.

But authenticity does exist, it is important, even essential, and we should struggle to place it in our work. We have a responsibility to explore. As always, the best way to dive in is not to create a complex abstract framework, but to look at examples.

I recently interviewed Ron Pompei, a designer well-known for his retail work (with Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, among others); he's speaking later this week at Gel 2005.

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Ron Pompei
Principal and CEO, Pompei A.D.

Q - How do you think about the retail customer experience?

Where would you rather shop, at a farmer's market or a supermarket? At a farmer's market you get good food, sold to you by the farmer who grew it. And she's not pretending to be Amish - that's not a costume. Everything there is authentic.

In a supermarket you get unidentifiable material, wrapped in plastic, with a bar code on it - you bring it to the front, swipe it with a laser, and then if you want to ask that person anything about that product, they have no idea. They only work the cash register.

Ever notice how a supermarket is a horrible experience? The lighting is atrocious. A fluorescent light actually operates like a strobe, so it tires your eyes, because you're constantly adjusting to the change in light. That's why people who work there are nuts. Like in department stores, they're crazy. They live their adult lives under fluorescent lights.

When shopping in a farmer's market, or a flea market, or at Anthropologie, you can see something and move toward it. You have freedom and can explore. You know you're kinesthetically free. There are more than five senses; there are many more. For example, kinesthetic, equilibrium, sense of temperature. You know if you're going toward life or away from life.

In a supermarket, the aisles are telling you, and you know it subconsciously, "we're going to show you everything before you leave the store, and we might sell you one more thing before you leave the store."

You tell me what's better: exploring with a sense of excitement, or someone shoving something in your facing and telling you how to walk through the space?

Retailers should take responsibility for what they sell, so that they aren't manipulated by the brands asking for so much shelf space. Instead, they should choose what's best for the customer. They should be merchant, not a conveyor belt. Think of where merchants came from: their ships were only so big; did they come back with every possible thing? No. "This is a good spice, a good carpet, a good wine." And with that same thinking, they brought back different mathematics, religion, art, artifacts, philosophies. Fibonacci brought the zero from the Middle East. Imagine a computer using Roman numerals.

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