27 Mar 2008 2234H

Real-world retail shopping research

Unsurprisingly, a lot of techniques we use in user experience have their roots in social science research. Eyetracking writ large using people with real shopping carts and RFID tags still produces heat maps. And given enough observations, you can even use k-means cluster analysis to come up with your archetypical personas.

Which is basically what a team at Wharton did a few years ago, when they began to study traffic in a supermarket: by applying the tools above which are very similar to things we ourselves might use with web analytics, user observations, surveys and so on, except, of course, that the degree of rigor being applied is considerably more severe. The research team came up with 14 archetypical shopping paths typical of supermarket travel. It’s a pretty interesting study actually and shakes up rather established nostrums around what people believe about merchandising in supermarkets.

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