When you design an architectural space, are you concerned with how you might push or pull your occupant while they travel through it? What about when they are standing still? Your occupant’s frame of reference serves to balance them — and you, as the architect, can really play upon this factor.

In essence, you are creating a “shopping experience” for your occupant, and this can apply to more that just retail type architecture. Just as shoppers walk quickly, take their time, stop to browse or stop to rest…your architecture needs to provide good opportunities for your occupants to speed up or slow down.

Like in the painting Four-Way Intersection (above), people can be asked to show different amounts of energy at different points in our designs. Just imagine walking along the sidewalks in the painting — it’s a good thing that there is an intersection providing not only a resting point, but also a chance to regain that frame of balance and reference.

Negotiate Your Occupant’s Efforts

Occupants go through your building spaces and often this takes energy — physically, mentally and even emotionally. So, let me ask you this: What does your design do with their energy? Does it use it efficiently, creatively or do you simply waste it.

Imagine an occupant traveling through a museum design. Will it work better to save the best for last? Or should the important design moments be revealed to them along their journey — in “bite-sized” pieces?

Really, it is all a negotiation, where you must balance their attention, their physical energy and their emotional state.

The IKEA Experience

The store IKEA does an interesting job regarding what I’m talking about. Here is a breakdown of a customer’s experience at IKEA in the United States: Read more

Both exterior and interior design elements of a building have the power to influence occupants, and for retail environments those occupants are potential consumers. The goal for most retail owners is to not only make sales during first time visits, but to encourage return visits so consumers become loyal customers.

THE CONSUMER’S DECISION MAKING PROCESS

Explained in the video below is some insightful information about how our human brain center works. It is useful to know that this region of the brain helps us to collect evidence before we make a decision, but did you know that there is another brain region that expresses confidence and/or awareness of that decision?

Just imagine how this might impact your building occupants, especially those that are engaging in consumer behavior.

One sure-fire way to influence customer behavior is to really understand what goes on during the decision making process. In knowing this, your designs can help to sway behavior by introducing elements at just the right time in an occupant’s experience.

Yes, consumer’s must gather evidence that goes into their behavior (whether to buy or not to buy), but much of this evidence can be collected while within a store — if a product is good and presented in just the right way.

THE POWER OF SUGGESTION

The scientist in the following video explains that people tend to underestimate their own confidence in a decision. Sometimes, people have made their decision, but are not yet Read more

You enter a store. It is probably not on your mind that its design layout was put together to optimize purchases made by you. You shop, you browse and; hopefully, you buy. Yet still, stores are doing whatever they can to market for what they call “the moment of truth” – that moment you decide to reach for your item. As a designer, does the collection of these moments ultimately yield the success of your design?

In the Economist magazine, an article entitled The Science of Shopping – The Way the Brain Buys dissects grocery store shopping. It takes a look at both current and future designs for shopping experience. Of course, such designs go beyond simple product placement on shelves where the aim is often to increase “dwell time”. As we progress into the future, shopping experiences will have as much to do with marketing to our subconscious as they have to do with new shopping “analysis” technologies.

It strikes me that the Science of Shopping article delves into how stores plan to influence shoppers using surveillance technologies. From devices that automatically scan product prices in your cart (using RFID tags) to technology that detects and calculates facial expression with purchase history; stores will seem to do whatever they can to make those sales. But, what will happen to shopping experience?

The article states that retail design will market by tapping evermore into shopper emotion and memory. It seems that targeting the senses is a priority. For example, the article describes a supermarket that makes use of the olfactory sense where aromas of fresh linens help to sell items in the laundry section. Also, cameras that do real-time analysis of a shopper in action may provide streaming data of how a shopper moves through a store. Where the shopper stops, what the shopper picks up and sets back down, what the shopper has placed in his or her cart all are dynamic pieces of information to be used for (or against) the shopper. (It depends on how you see it.)

Already, there are privacy groups against such types of surveillance. Would you want your shopping history or practices revealed? Also, can stores really and truly influence your shopping to the extent that they predict? I wonder how many people go into a store, get what they need and then get out. I know for sure that good design plays a major role in the success or failure of a retail marketing tactic.

Integrated marketing within retail environments makes for good interaction design. The key is to provide helpful services that truly make shopping and buying better. I have to question the importance of bombarding a shopper with needless and often wasteful “suggestions”. Even if surveillance technologies could read the brain, as they say they will in the future, will the suggestion of what is perceived as a “pleasurable” product be a helpful contribution or a waste of energy while shopping?

In the end, it is always important to be a smart shopper. As architects and designers, it makes sense to selectively target the enhancements for shopper experience. As the article stipulates — “The notion of shoppers wearing brain scanning hats would be ridiculous”. Design for shopping experience in the future by doing more than pushing a product simply because a shopper’s brain lit up when shown that product. Find valuable meaning to make those sales for designs that keep shoppers coming back.