It's time to apply some grocery knowledge to UI design.

I spent the summer of 2007 working as an intern at General Mills.  They had a weekly lecture series where some big wig from the company would talk to the interns to help us understand the business.  One of the talks was about how much thought goes into where food is placed in a grocery store.

There were tons of interesting topics, but I bet you don't really care that much about cereal so I'll skip to the good one.  You surely know that the cereal on the bottom shelves costs less than the cereal at eye level.  What I didn't know was that the most sought after spot is at the middle of the aisle.  Apparently people tend to start walking down the aisle of a grocery store and they aren't mentally prepared to buy anything until they've walked about 15 feet.  They spend that time absorbing the fact that they want cereal and then they start actually looking at products.

So all the major players in the cereal industry (apparently) fight over the middle of the aisle.  It's not just about who has their boxes at eye level or who has the eye-catching designs.  It's not good enough to make sure that customers see your product.  Customers need to see a product when they're in the right state of mind.

So now I'm wondering how I can apply this to web design.

A good example of me trying to think like I'm at the General can be seen on the front page of this site.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think that my bio is the least important part of this site.  So why did I put it third instead of fourth on the home page?  I basically figured that people are likely to skim across the items and pay more attention to the last item (resume) than the one before it.

I also read recently (sorry, can't find the link) that the two most important parts of a page are the top left (where the user begins reading) and the bottom right (where the eyes stop when they're done).  All the stuff in between is generally just skimmed but most people notice the first thing and the last thing they see.  I guess it's similar to how you can jumble up the letters in the middle of words but as long as the first and last letters are correct, people can generally read the word in a sentence (example: I enjoy swonbraodnig in Park City).

I'm far from an expert when it comes to this stuff, but here's what I'm going to try to do to improve.  Whenever I design a new page, I'm not just going to attract the user to action items by making them big or a different color.  I'm going to try to lead the user to an item through all the other content.

This article from Smashing Magazine has a great example of what I'm talking about (go down to number 6 on their list).  I need to funnel the user experience to the important parts of the page.  It's not just calling out the important things, but it's guiding attention to those important things.  This way the user isn't just seeing the "SIGN UP NOW OMG!!!!1" button, they're approaching it in a natural way that hopefully makes them feel more comfortable and willing to see what the next page is like.

I need to come up with more examples of this.  I must admit that while I've thought about this idea a lot at a high level, I haven't gotten to the point of trying it out a whole lot.  We'll see how it goes.