Monday, May 17, 2010

What's on isle 12?

Yesterday, while I was doing my weekly grocery shopping, I stumbled upon this on an end cap:



It's a map of the grocery store, intending to show you were different departments were (deli, dairy, frozen) as well as where certain items were located.

At first I thought "Yes! What every shopper has been waiting for!" and "This is even better than those electronic carts that promised to tell me where the jell-o was but I never saw them in my store." And then, I looked closer at the map and was instantly disappointed.

There was no key on the map. What did the different colors mean? Yellow? Brown? Blue? Green?
Several areas were denoted with the same color but clearly contained different types of food--red for the hot food area but also red for the condiment isle?

What was going on here?

Without the use of a key and consistent use of colors to denote similar product categories through out the store, the map made me work harder to understand what it was trying to tell me. I found the effort it took to try to understand the map was more than was needed to walk up and down each isle in the store, looking for the jell-o.

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