The fish-slapping shopping cart
Most online shoppers spend a lot of time with different shopping carts. Not to mention the ones actually at the store, a lot of our time online is spent interacting with e-commerce software. I don’t think I’m alone that when somebody says the phrase “shopping cart,” I generally think of a Web-based cart, not the ones in queue at New Seasons.
That being said, check out this great cart. It requires Macromedia’s Flash Player™.
Why is this so funny? Thirteen years ago this might have been slightly funny, probably a bit cute. However, after more than a decade of working on and using “shopping carts” that are actually nothing more than grids of pictures of products, I sat entranced when I watched this, giggling all the while. So did my wife, who forwarded the link to me.
The trick of this joke is to set up a code of conduct, then to suddenly break it in an outrageous way. A classic example of this is Monty Python’s fish-slapping dance:
Note that this is funny in other contexts, too:
So what’s my point? We’ve been setting ourselves up for this e-commerce fish-slapping dance punchline for more than a decade.
The e-commerce shopping cart as we know it has created its own version of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. These expected norms are now so strong that violating them is extremely amusing. These norms also limit what we’re willing to design for fear of being laughed at. There are definite rules about what you can and can’t do. Not only does this “shopping cart” metaphor limit us, but it’s no longer really a metaphor: the phrase is actually just a pair of two homonyms with related meanings. It’s rather boring, and I think we’re getting close to stagnation.
And stagnation is just an opportunity to do something different that suddenly makes sense to everybody. New ideas, anyone?
