Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Design a website like IKEA? Ikea as Rat-Maze


It’s a cliché that casinos are designed to prevent people from recognizing how much time has passed (no windows) and to steer people away from exit routes and back to the tables.
But much more salient, to me at least, is the infuriating design of Ikea stores. Invariably, my wife and I separate at some point and then, once I’m done browsing, I end up spending 20 minutes walking in circles trying to find the route back to children’s furniture (or some other designated meeting spot). I wind up passing the same mock studio apartment half a dozen times, blood pressure rising with each new sighting.
This confusion is carefully planned and orchestrated by Ikea, explained Alan Penn, a professor of architectural computing at University College London, in a recent lecture, in which he makes use of some very cool maps and digitized models of customer flow. One result of Ikea’s rat-maze design: 60% of the things people buy there were not on their original shopping list.
The company also pulls off a rather difficult balancing act: “There are a lot of people who go there and don’t enjoy it, but still seem to keep going back,” Penn says.



Ikea as Rat-Maze - Ideas Market - WSJ

The Cost of an Exception Application Performance, Scalability and Architecture – The dynaTrace Blog

Not using exceptions because of their potential performance impact is a bad idea. Exceptions help to provide a uniform way to cope with runtime problems and they help to write clean code



The Cost of an Exception Application Performance, Scalability and Architecture – The dynaTrace Blog