IKEA and wayfinding

I spend a lot of time at the IKEA in Bangalore since the restaurant is great to work from, but I rarely, if ever, actually wander through the store. The store’s lack of windows and the general sameness of the environment has confused me many times and until very late, I was not aware of the shortcuts I could take to get out faster.

Experienced IKEA shoppers may have noticed ‎that the shortcuts change over time. This is to prevent too many consumers from learning about and using them. And as part of the general retail principle of changing up the layout to keep repeat shoppers stimulated\ …\ The new IKEA line map dispenses with reality altogether – it is a purely abstract one dimensional representation of an intensely non-linear, two dimensional space. As a result, trans‎posing the map to the physical reality of the store now requires significant mental effort. Hence most shoppers give up and stick to the flow of the shopping path.

The author makes some valid points, but perhaps I wasn’t the audience this was written for because whenever I do roam the store, I love to do it. But it still has some great observations about wayfinding and the use of maps within the stores (I also didn’t know that the general layout is almost the same for every IKEA).