Furniture.com Unveils the Future of Home Furnishing Shopping With Introduction of Innovative Room Planner, Powered by Macromedia Flash

Furniture World Magazine

Furniture.com, (www.furniture.com), the e-commerce leader in the $178 billion dollar furniture and home furnishings market, has introduced the first online Room Planner created just for the home. Powered by Macromedia's Flash technology, Furniture.com's Room Planner helps consumers design a room and visualize how furniture will look in their homes before making a purchase. Developed by Furniture.com with InterNoded of Cambridge, Mass. (www.internoded.com), Room Planner adds exciting visual interactivity to Furniture.com by performing advanced graphical capabilities with extremely small file sizes. The complete Room Planner application is only 90k, enabling extremely fast interaction, even with low bandwidth connections - an especially important attribute when appealing to consumers who may be shopping from home via a dial-up Internet account. Room Planner allows shoppers to re-create rooms in their homes to scale, combining their own, existing furniture and room features with new Furniture.com selections. Shoppers can now quickly browse Furniture.com's vast selection, choose the perfect pieces of furniture for their style and budget, and then easily view the furniture in an online floor plan of their home. By simply clicking and dragging the pieces around the room, consumers can conceptualize how the room will look with the new furniture items. Special touches - aimed at creating a truly enjoyable experience - include sound effects as a shopper "drags" an item of furniture across the floor and lamps appear to light up as shoppers "mouse over" the icon. Room Planner also incorporates additional technology features to integrate the Flash-based application with Furniture.com's existing e-commerce technology, Shoppers can save dozens of different room layouts in their Room Planner by registering with Furniture.com. When they're ready to purchase, Room Planner allows true "drag and drop" e-commerce by enabling shoppers to instantly "buy" their floor plan all of the Furniture.com selections depicted in their planned room with one click of their mouse. "Furniture.com appeals to every home owner or renter's desire to create their ultimate dream home. Our success as the industry leader is a result of understanding our customers as well as creating the innovative tools they need to successfully design a new look and recreate it in their homes," said Furniture.com VP of Marketing Kirsten von Hassel. "Our drive to deliver the best online consumer experience in the industry has set a precedent in the home furnishings and e-commerce markets." "Furniture.com's innovative use of Macromedia Flash shows that it is dedicated to creating the best user experience possible for its customers," said Mark Strassman, group product marketing manager for Web Publishing at Macromedia. "We are pleased that they have made Flash a key technology as they continue to break new ground in the online home furnishings market." InterNoded's Director of Interactive Services, Steve Street states, "Working on such a high-profile account has been an exciting challenge for our team. Using such advanced design technologies will help maintain Furniture.com's presence as a leader and trend setter in Internet commerce." In addition to the innovative Room Planner, the site offers a variety of other tools to enable consumers to even further customize their shopping experience. Some new features include the Style Guide, which helps consumers identify their own personal styles; the powerful Room Search, which chooses only those pieces from Furniture.com's extensive selection appropriate for the shopper's specified room selection; and the most powerful search tool developed for this market - the Furniture Finder - which allows shoppers to quickly find exactly what they are looking for, with detailed criteria such as delivery time and dimensions. In addition, the new pop-up Fact Tags feature and online magazine, your home Magazine, delivers more detailed - and unbiased information about furniture products, selection and design.