I live in the Denver area, where most of us in a 100-mile radius have seen the towering IKEA sign over construction indicating the imminent arrival of a new place for us to experience discount shopping nirvana. I, however, have always hated shopping there because of the store layout, which I knew was purposefully designed to inspire some typical behavioral response other than the one produced in my head (get the heck out of here as quickly as possible). So it was with great interest that I watched the following video late last night:
In case you don’t want to spend 38 minutes watching the lecture, here’s a brief summary. After a behavioral study, the researchers found that the IKEA architecture is highly disorienting and unintelligible, yet there is only one route to follow. Therefore, shoppers spend most of their “time allocation” in the showroom, and by the time they get to the marketplace at the end, they feel licensed to make impulse purchases, specifically on the items where the company makes a good profit margin at high volumes.
They argue that the unintelligibility of the layout encourages the shopper to enter into a power exchange with the merchant whereby the shoppers sacrifice their autonomy. I won’t pontificate about the ethics of this much here — check out my colleague Brad Nunnally’s recent post about Ethical Frameworks for Behavioral Design for more in that vein — but this is definitely food for thought on design and ethics in general.
For those who might want to apply this research to web design, I don’t see much comparative value because the shopper who travels to a store is much more vested in the experience than someone on a web site, and countless studies have shown that people bail out of web sites within seconds of not finding what they want. Disorientation is something web users run screaming from because they are likely to find a quick and easy alternative just tabs away.
As for me, IKEA, I’d like to think I’ll be impervious to your design manipulation now that I’m on to you. I realize with a twinge of disappointment, though, that the last time I went to one of your stores, I came out with a bunch of little things from the marketplace. Buyer be aware.
Anyone interested in helping me develop a mobile app that takes you right to the item you want in IKEA, puts it in a virtual cart, lets you check out and then walk backward to the door with a virtual receipt and the item in hand so you can bypass the marketplace? There should be an app for that.
