The Universe of Discourse

A sticky problem that evaporated

Back in early 1995, I worked on an incredibly early e-commerce site.
The folks there were used to producing shopping catalogs for distribution in airplane seat-back pockets and such like, and they were going to try bringing a catalog to this World-Wide Web thing that people were all of a sudden talking about.

One of their clients was Eddie Bauer. They wanted to put up a product catalog with a page for each product, say a sweatshirt, and the page should show color swatches for each possible sweatshirt color.

“Sure, I can do that,” I said. “But you have to understand that the user may not see the color swatches exactly as you expect them to.” Nobody would need to have this explained now, but in early 1995 I wasn't sure the catalog folks would understand. When you have a physical catalog you can leaf through a few samples to make sure that the printer didn't mess up the colors.

But what if two months down the line the Eddie Bauer people were shocked by how many complaints customers had about things being not quite the right color, “Hey I ordered mulberry but this is more like maroonish.” Having absolutely no way to solve the problem, I didn't want to to land in my lap, I wanted to be able to say I had warned them ahead of time. So I asked “Will it be okay that there will be variations in how each customer sees the color swatches?”

The catalog people were concerned. Why wouldn't the colors be the same? And I struggled to explain: the customer will see the swatches on their monitor, and we have no idea how old or crappy it might be, we have no idea how the monitor settings are adjusted, the colors could be completely off, it might be a monochrome monitor, or maybe the green part of their RGB video cable is badly seated and the monitor is displaying everything in red, blue, and purple, blah blah blah… I completely failed to get the point across in a way that the catalog people could understand.

They looked more and more puzzled, but then one of them brightened up suddenly and said “Oh, just like on TV!”

“Yes!” I cried in relief. “Just like that!”

“Oh sure, that's no problem.” Clearly, that was what I should have said in the first place, but I hadn't thought of it.

I no longer have any idea who it was that suddenly figured out what Geek Boy's actual point was, but I'm really grateful that they did.

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