If You Can't Beat Them, Confuse Them!

I don't think many people would argue that a customer's shopping experience should be simple and intuitive. Despite this, some online stores and brick and mortar retail outlets almost seem to be deliberately making their stores and websites harder to navigate. Why would anyone in their right mind want to do this? In theory, if you can make the customer look harder to find needed supplies, they may in the case of a brick and mortar outlet at least go down some aisles they wouldn't otherwise.

Since the local A&P reorganized its stock, I've been dumbfounded trying to find goods that used to be so intuitive to find. Instead of grouping similar products like paper towels, napkins and tissues all in the same aisle, now they appear in separate shopping aisles that are not even adjacent! They may have thought this would encourage people to buy more but the reality is that the store never seems to be any busier and now it takes twice as long to do the same shopping. Often I find it so annoying that I'll go out of my way to ShopRite instead.

In the case of online stores, some sites actually throw a million pitches at you deliberately to upsell or grab your attention. While this approach sometimes works, when the site becomes so complicated that it's hard to navigate, the user might abandon the order. Shoplet for example, is well designed in certain regards but it can be a little intimidating particularly to novices. Personally, I prefer sites that show automatically what you have placed on the cart instead of making you click the cart icon. Likewise, when the checkout button is hard to find or not even visible until another action is completed, it can be pretty annoying.

While retail chains like A&P are reorganizing their stores and online mega-stores throw everything but the kitchen sink at you, the German supermarket chain Aldi is taking a different approach. Instead of trying to keep you in the store longer like A&P, Aldi tries to streamline the user experience to make it as easy as possible to find products. By combining this approach with cheaper prices than even Wal-Mart, the chain has been expanding and has recently announced that it will be opening 45 new stores. If history is any indicator, investors will downplay this as more stores are deliberately convoluted and simple web sites find a niche for those looking for an escape from cluttered/hard to navigate sites.