How the Candy Aisle Taught Me More About UX Than Any Agency Workshop
Let me paint a picture: I’m standing in a painfully average dairy in Hamilton. I'm not even hungry. But I can’t stop looking at the way the chocolate bars are arranged. There’s a power hierarchy here. A story. A UX map disguised as a snack rack.
Whittaker's gets the eye-level shelf, obviously. But then there’s a small, slightly sad stack of novelty sour candies in weird foil packaging half-hiding in the corner. Below those? The shotgun approach to pricing. Handwritten tags, half-falling off, somehow still achieving the golden triangle of frictionless shopper flow. Cadbury might've paid for placement, but Milk Bottles won the war with innocence.
Here’s the thing. This is the closest analogue I’ve seen to how users interact with a homepage. People think they’re choosing, but most of the path is prewritten. We talk about conversion rates and bounce times, but really, we should be studying human hesitation in action. Watch someone pick between Jet Planes and Pineapple Lumps and you’ll get a front-row seat to the micro-chains of decision-making.
Designers and marketers love to pretend they’re orchestrating big journeys. But sometimes you just need to stand still long enough to notice how much story you can tell with a shelf edge. The dairy was doing UX intuitively. No heatmapping, no A/B testing, just texture, rhythm, and the sly whisper of nostalgia doing all the work. Someone give that dairy owner a Cannes Lion.
Whittaker's gets the eye-level shelf, obviously. But then there’s a small, slightly sad stack of novelty sour candies in weird foil packaging half-hiding in the corner. Below those? The shotgun approach to pricing. Handwritten tags, half-falling off, somehow still achieving the golden triangle of frictionless shopper flow. Cadbury might've paid for placement, but Milk Bottles won the war with innocence.
Here’s the thing. This is the closest analogue I’ve seen to how users interact with a homepage. People think they’re choosing, but most of the path is prewritten. We talk about conversion rates and bounce times, but really, we should be studying human hesitation in action. Watch someone pick between Jet Planes and Pineapple Lumps and you’ll get a front-row seat to the micro-chains of decision-making.
Designers and marketers love to pretend they’re orchestrating big journeys. But sometimes you just need to stand still long enough to notice how much story you can tell with a shelf edge. The dairy was doing UX intuitively. No heatmapping, no A/B testing, just texture, rhythm, and the sly whisper of nostalgia doing all the work. Someone give that dairy owner a Cannes Lion.