After six hours of Christmas shopping on Saturday, I couldn’t help but notice how little attention retailers seem to pay to the customers’ in store experience. Finding a DVD was the worst, mainly because I couldn’t tell how the movies were categorised in any store I visited. But then I started wondering.  With all this rampant commercialisation, is it a good idea that things are easier to buy? Can usability and market research be used for evil instead of good?

For example, supermarket design is evil. Most supermarkets make it deliberately hard to get to commonly purchased items. They ensure that milk and bread are at the furthest corner from the store entrance. This means customers must travel the length of the store to find them, hopefully making more impulse purchases on the way. Essentially, they are being enticed into buying items which usually yield a higher profit than the staple products.

Here’s the thing. We all know that knowledge is power. So when retailers understand human behaviour, and use this knowledge to influence customers for their own ends, it is easy to abuse that power.

In 1937 a New York ad agency executive urged his colleagues to inject "a little fear in advertising…fear in women of being frumps, fear in men of being duds." There is no denying that in a society flooded with mass advertising we can’t really hope to avoid this influence. Everyone knows that marketers are out to get us, and we struggle to escape their snares.

I’m not suggesting that we don’t study and understand how people behave. The key is to use this knowledge responsibly, in a way that respects the consumers’ best interests.

For example, usability takes into account users’ goals, as well as the business goals. If my goal is to buy a present for my father, and a store helps me to achieve that goal, then that’s perfect. That’s why those little tickets that say ‘Good for Him’ can be very useful signposts. That’s what I want.

As Gerald Zaltman writes in How Customers Think, using knowledge about unconscious processes to better understand and satisfy customers is good. It’s only when this information is used to influence them involuntarily that it’s evil.

[I recommend looking at Inconspicuous Consumption: Lessons for Web Design from Mall and Retail Design for a fascinating 3-part series on applying real life shopping experiences back to the web.]

- Trent