The science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

A store has 3 distinct aspects: design (the premises), merchandising (whatever you put in it) and operations (whatever employees do). They’re closely intertwined, interrelated and interdependent, so changing one of them will affect the other two as well. Their correlations are thoroughly covered in Paco Underhill’s analysis of an evolving shopping culture. It’s one of these books that in addition to substantial advice on customers’ tastes and habits is able to entertain us with witty anecdotes and gripping details.
The book has been incredibly well summarized by Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker article: The Science of Shopping, so instead of writing a mere ersatz of Gladwell’s review (which definitely is a must-read), I’ll focus on the book’s guidelines for designers.

To begin with:

“Display designers apparently never go into stores to see their creations in action, so they don’t have a firm grip on what happens in the real world.”

The main criterion for whether the sign is of any good is an in-place assessment. It’s not just about displays, but actually any piece of so-called commercial design. Whether it’s a logo, a display, a graph, a banner, or even a website, check whether it works in the actual environment. Am I able to find your product while walking or does it require a 5-minute gaze at the product shelf? Is it possible to find out what the purpose of this particular website is within few nanoseconds?

“The best sign in either case is one you can read fast, and positioned so you can read it while moving. And the only way to achieve that in most instances, is to break the information down into pieces and lay them out at a time, in a logical, orderly sequence as the customer gets farther into the store.”

So: Get your audience’s attention. Present your message in a clear, logical fashion. Deliver the information the way people absorb it, a bit at a time and in the proper sequence. If the information is too complex to be explained in just a few words, change the information, as in some case even the best design will not make it easier to comprehend.

“In a second and a half you can read like 3 or 4 words. Putting a sign that requires twelve seconds to read in a place where customers spend four seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.”

The faster people walk past your display, the shorter the information has to be. Even when people actually have more time to stop and ponder, putting the entire message at once is not sexy at all. It’s like a stripper who takes off all her clothes before you even enter the bar. No tease, no desire, no buy.

“Every store is a collection of zones, and you’ve got to map them before you can place a single sign.”

Pay attention to the sign position. People are less likely to notice something BEFORE completing the task they are to fulfill (for example: ordering a sandwich in a fast food restaurant or going to the toilet), but will share their attention AFTER (e.g. they’ve ordered a sandwich and are waiting for it). Same applies for instance to banking websites. If I log in to pay my bills, I’ll skip any information on my way besides login and password input fields. But I might actually read some advertisement while the transfer is being processed.

These are just a few rules, several others are implied in almost every chapter. However, the greatest advice from The Science of Shopping is: know your customers’ behaviour and adapt to it. If a promotion display placed at the very entrance is missed, put it 3 meters farther into the shop (you’d be surprised how often it worked). If a particular link buried somewhere in your website is getting 80% clicks, don’t hesitate to put it on the frontpage. If customers have problems finding your product, redesign the packaging. Simply pay attention to customers’ behaviour, context and results. And never stop to improve.

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Ogilvy’s principles of management

1. Remember that Abraham Lincoln spoke of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He left out the pursuit of profit.
2. Remember the old Scottish motto: “Be happy while you’re living, for you are a long time dead.”
3. If you have to reduce your company’s payroll, don’t fire your people until you have cut your compensation and the compensation of your big-shots.
4. Define your corporate culture and your principles of management in writing. Don’t delegate this to a committee. Search all the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.
5. Stop cutting the quality of your products in search of bigger margins. The consumer always notices — and punishes you.
6. Never spend money on advertising which does not sell.
7. Bear in mind that the consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Do not insult her intelligence.
[via: Patricia Sellers]

For the Love of Culture

“For 75 percent of the eighteen million books in our libraries, the rule of the plaintiffs would have been a digital death sentence. For these works–presumptively under copyright but no longer in print–to require permission first is to guarantee invisibility. These works are, practically speaking, orphans. It is effectively impossible–at least at the wholesale level–to secure permission for any use that triggers copyright law.”
Lawrence Lessig’s, as always insightful essay on Google, copyright and our future.

Milton Glaser: Ten things I have learned

1 You can only work for people that you like.
2 If you have a choice never have a job.
3 Some people are toxic avoid them.
4 Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5 Less is not necessarily more.
6 Style is not to be trusted.
7 How you live changes your brain.
8 Doubt is better than certainty.
9 On aging.
10 Tell the truth.
full post here & a short documentary.

Design Imperialism

“A key point of failure in today’s global design landscape lies precisely in the jargon — we need to invent new ways of writing, talking and thinking about concepts of “humanitarian design”; we need new language that doesn’t homogenize entire cultures, new vocabulary that better reflects the intricate lace of the world’s biocultural and psychosocial diversity as a drawing board for design.” Maria Popova on The Language of Design Imperialism. Insightful.

Of Frog Wines and Frowning Watches: Semantic Priming, Perceptual Fluency and Brand Evaluation

“Visual features that have no meaningful association with the product itself can actually make consumers like the product, provided that these features are something that the consumer can easily identify with.This means that critters on wine labels, however odd that may be, can be a good sales strategy. It allows a marketer to target a certain consumer by using images on labels that represent an important aspect of that customer’s life. Moreover, there are potentially many ways to make that label as unique as possible because a logo would be chosen based on who the target customers are and not on what that product is.” Building a Better Brand: How feelings shape product evaluation.

The Sins of St. Paul

“I did not know Paul Rand. I did not work for him or study under him. My understanding of his importance, then, has been gained in the same way as students and practitioners in years to come will gain theirs: through books like Modernist Design. (…) So it’s with some trepidation that I wonder if I might lodge a few complaints about Mr. Rand as a model for graphic design practice. But here goes.” M. Bierut on Paul Rand.

“Any design student could do a better job”

“I never knew a designer that got hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a logo. Mostly, designers get paid to negotiate the difficult terrain of individual egos, expectations, tastes, and aspirations of various individuals in an organization or corporation, against business needs, and constraints of the marketplace. This is a process that can take a year or more. Getting a large, diverse group of people to agree on a single new methodology for all of their corporate communications means the designer has to be a strategist, psychiatrist, diplomat, showman, and even a Svengali.
The complicated process is worth money. That’s what clients pay for. The process, usually a series of endless presentations and refinements, persuasions and proofs, results, hopefully, in an accepted identity design” What they don’t teach you about identity design by Paula Scher.

Steven Heller on Olympic Pictograms

Briefly and to the point (& video): Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages.

Quiet logos

“Lindstrom suggests that too much messaging on a product’s packaging can actually prevent a sale. Logos and words can engage the rational mind, causing people to actually think harder about making a purchase. It’s a counter-intuitive notion, but then think about the effectiveness of the quiet logos on a bottle of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, or a Method product, or the entire Apple product line up.” The Myth of the Rational Buyer: How Too Much Thinking Can Hurt Your Brand

Meetings, the Google way

Not exactly on the main subject of this blog, but hey, branding actually IS about meetings. Meetings, the Google way:
1. Set a firm agenda. 2. Assign a note-taker. 3. Carve out micro-meetings. 4. Hold office hours.
5. Discourage politics, use data. 6. Stick to the clock. [via: supervolatile]

Idiologie / branding & everything else

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