Alonovo.com
Alonovo came to us with a difficult challenge: design a shopping application in five weeks that integrates 80% of Amazon.com's inventory via Amazon Web Services. But that wasn’t the real challenge. They also asked us to design a user interface that clearly presents Social Responsibility Index (SRI) information for many of Amazon's products and then allows users to set their own values in relation to the SRI data. By using an agile software approach and developing in Ruby On Rails, we successfully launched the Alonovo site in time for the 2005 holiday shopping season.
Presenting Complex Data
What makes Alonovo unique is their desire to make shopping online more than
just an economic activity. Their website is a political and environmental
education tool that encourages users to make informed choices about what
they buy based on SRI data that appears next to the products they purchase.
Alonovo asked us to create a unique interface that presents their SRI data and also allows users to adjust the data in real time to decide which issues affect how they shop. You can set your own values within an SRI classification like “Social Responsibility” to decide if education, volunteering and animal rights are more or less important to how you judge a company. Once you set your values, the website recalculates the SRI score for all the companies and the products they offer which allows you to compare two companies like Apple and Sony when you are considering an electronics purchase.