Supermarket layout and design has become a heady mix of art and science these days. Where and how products are placed makes a big difference apparently on the sales of those products. At the entrance is the fresh produce section – enticing you in and making you feel like you just walked into the local farmers market. At the end of the aisles are the special promotions, all the key products are at eye level etc. Add to this the enormous amount of effort that food companies put into packaging design and suddenly you feel like a cog in a massive capitalist machine. I guess our economy may not be planned but as consumers we are heavily influenced according to our perceived needs and desires.

So returning to the analogy maybe information and knowledge management has a lot to learn from ‘supermarket science’?

Some questions to think about here:
http://faculty.msb.edu/homak/HomaHelpSite/WebHelp/McKinsey_-_Supermarket_Layout.htm

This one is good because of the ‘movement map’:
http://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/article.php?id=248

Thanks again for a really interesting analogy – could maybe serve as a useful learning scaffold?

I had expirience like this on my first trip to Budapest where my mom took me to the pastry-shop. But I believe I was small enough to get used to variety of information and to find my out of information overload. At the same time my father still struggles through these jungles and I see here the generations problem. When working within organization we have not only work with general information overload but also with different ages and their habbits.

*@mathemagenic Neat supermarkets and infooverload post [link to post]
It’s amazing how quickly we internalise their maps, though. – Posted using Chat Catcher

Cheese overload = info overload: [link to post] /by @mathemagenic, via @BFchirpy. >Are we becoming practiced at not drowning in info? – Posted using Chat Catcher

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

I had the opposite experience moving to Czechoslovakia in 1990. My first trip to the shop and all I could see were frozen tomatoes, flour, beer and meat in jelly – I remember thinking, “I’m never going to be able to cook a meal out of this. . .” The other thing that struck me was the lack of the one-stop-shop arrangement. In Britain, you could buy everything at the supermarket but there you had to go to one shop for vegetables, one shop for meat. The weirdest was going to the stationer’s to buy toilet paper.

Is this information underload? Is this the same way feel when traditionalists see their first piece of abstract art?

Anyway, I guess I’m trying to point out that it’s not just quantity but architecture when it comes to information overload. I’m in Tokyo at the moment and one of the things I’m really enjoying is the sensation of illiteracy and information overload. It’s great for the empathy muscles. I think all knowledge management/information architect types should spend some time here so they can underside what it’s like to be a user of their services.

RT @mathemagenic: recently blogged: What supermarket shopping has in common with information overload? [link to post] – Posted using Chat Catcher

I believe this is one of the reasons for the explosion of Google. Remembering where you need to go to get what you need to find is overwhelming (even with resources Bookmarks, Yahoo, Wikipedia, etc). Google has tapped into the need for information structure and also in a sense, plays to our laziness. Who needs to remember if I can always search.

Firefox’s smartbar has also started to change the way I navigate and ‘remember’ information in this sea of information.

Just commented on @mathemagenic “What supermarket shopping has in common with information overload?” [link to post] – Posted using Chat Catcher