Observing shopper behaviors to improve display design and purchasing ease

Business Issue

Our client wanted to explore consumer shopping preferences to enhance the in-store shopping experience when purchasing a shower head at a major home improvement store chain.

In addition to optimizing the display of their in-store inventory, our client wanted to improve shopper satisfaction by including information about new and additional products that were available online to give shoppers a wider variety of options.

What We Did

Over the course of 21 shop-alongs, participants wore eye-tracking glasses and were asked to narrate their observations aloud while shopping. One major finding from the exercise was that the large amount of product information presented overwhelmed shoppers and made them even more susceptible to common decision-making biases.

Not a single shopper noticed the QR codes and signage about additional products online that our client considered critical pieces of information. Our behavioral science consultant identified the concept of Inattentional Blindness, which describes the way people pay attention to factors that are perceived as most important to the task at hand and not on things that fall outside their immediate attention.

Result

Introducing the concept of Inattentional Blindness and sharing an infamous example of it helped our clients internalize the shopper mindset and understand how they would miss such critical information.

Additionally, linking our insights to a specific theory enabled us to recommend clear strategies to highlight and draw shoppers’ attention to important signage by creating more visual separation and making the organization structure more apparent.

Leveraging behavioral science enabled us to make our client’s insights more relatable and inform clear next steps, leading to a better and more efficient shopping experience for their customers.