The Science of Shopping (1996) | Hacker News Reader

The Science of Shopping (1996)

gladwell.com

15 pointsdanw13 comments

Would love if you can share a similar article on online shopping - that'll immensely help this forum. We all are trying to create something that we would be able to offer online, or have people pay for subscription, or what have you. Would like to get into deeper psychology discussion on what makes people make such decision. Any thoughts? Articles?

Not that I know of. I'm currently exploring retail design, urban planning and architecture to learn how real spaces are designed and to translate it to the web.

I think Jacob Nielsen is probably an expert in this field: http://www.useit.com/ (beware of a really ugly design).

Other than this, I think the safest bet is to trust the data, e.g. A/B testing. Being too smart without any testing could lead to fatal mistakes - Google has thousands of phd's and they still trust real user testing more than "opinions" (at least according to Peter Norvig :)).

Paco Underhill seems to use the same method, i.e. observing real customers and then drawing conclusions.

Thx Amix. I was not aware of the site. Seems a very good resource, though its usability centered. I would still like to see some discussion around the original post - with web emphasis.

Perhaps like: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/ecommerce/checkout.html

Well, again, that link is design oriented. I guess I'm looking for a similar article to what the original topic was about: "Science of _online_ shopping"

I think majority of their analysis is by looking and analyzing real e-commerce customers by video, hot maps etc. - i.e. they basically do the same thing Paco Underhill does (thought Paco is probably a lot more detailed in his approach).

As for the "Right Turn", it would be translated to "Top Left of Text Block" rule: http://images.google.com/images?q=eye+tracking

On eye tracking and web forms http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000107.php

I've done a bit of desk research into ecommerce userbility studies, the journal Electronic Consumer Research is the most focussed, although 80% of the articles seem to be refuting the previous one published. The remaining 20% can be insightful (and provide useful terms with which to impress clients).

One thing I wonder about the invariant right is if it changes in countries where people drive and walk on the left side.

Wouldn't it be great if such meticulous studies were done on other things, such as education?

I remember reading this when it came out.

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