Why you get lost in IKEA
…and leave with trolleys full of Swedish furniture
When you walk into an IKEA store you’ve done a bit of research online, measured your room and made the case for a new purchase. You walk in thinking you know exactly what you’re there to accomplish and then suddenly it hits you.
Bright lights + confusing expansive layouts = confusion!
It’s down to something called The Gruen Transfer.
What is ‘The Gruen Transfer’?
It was coined by Austrian architect Victor Gruen, when he designed one of the first US shopping malls in the 50s.
“In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer is the moment when consumers enter a shopping mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, lose track of their original intentions, making them more susceptible to making impulse buys.” — Good old Wikipedia
Have you ever gone to your regular supermarket and wondered why they keep moving the toothbrushes around? Once you’re used to the layout of your supermarket you’re less likely to make impulsive purchases, so they constantly change where things are just enough to get you to look at products you usually would not see.
However, they can’t confuse you so much that you never find the thing you’re looking for. I doubt you’ll ever find the toothbrush in the bakery aisle.
3 ways to use this theory
- Get more sales: Consider moving a habitual user task to somewhere that you want to drive more traffic in a way that makes sense. For example: you might sell a lot of socks but not a lot of shoes. Combine them into a new footwear section so your user’s have to re-consider your whole product set and have to look at the shoes to see the socks.
- Protect users from impulse decisions: Allow your users to set favourites or recurring orders so they can stick to what they know without getting distracted.
- Instead of going to IKEA…order online.
Anyway, you should catch an episode of Gruen Transfer on the ABC just for the Russel Howcroft and Wil Anderson banter.
