Dark Patterns

 

Heat map of IKEA Floorplan, showing shoppers' paths

It all began when I wanted to go back to the lighting section and take a second look at a desk lamp.  But how do you do this quickly, if you've already entered the outdoor furnishing section at IKEA?  For years I've noticed that I always leave IKEA in a bad mood, tired and frusterated. But now I wonder if it just isn't fatigue.  . .

Alan Penn, whose work is profiled at 90% of Everything, examines the floor layouts of several stores and discovers that designers there purposefully try to confuse shoppers.  Called Dark Patterns, these floorplans are itended to obfuscate wayfinding but heighten sales:

What Ikea have done is taken away something which is very fundamental, evolved into us, and they’ve designed an environment that operates quite differently, given that we are forward facing people, embodied [...] from the way it would happen if you just looked down from outer space. Its effect is highly disorienting.

Ikea is highly disorienting and yet there is only one route to follow. [...] Before long, you’ve got a trolley full of stuff that is not the things that you came there for. Something in the order of 60% of purchases at Ikea are not the things that people had on their shopping list when they came in the first place. That’s phenomenal. There is a complete disjunction between those two.