Page 15 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle
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15 CHAPTER 2 IDENTIFYING THE MESSY MIDDLE
Observed shopping behaviour
Google started out as a postgraduate research project, so we have a healthy
respect for the perspectives of academics and experts. However, our
ultimate source of truth is always the consumer, and we knew we wanted to
find a way to get back to their perspective.
Our method for doing this was to observe several hundred hours of shopping
tasks, covering 310 different journeys across 31 categories. In these tasks,
shoppers were asked to research a product for which they were currently
in-market. Journeys were recorded using screen capture audio and video,
while the shoppers talked us through what they were doing. The Behavioural
Architects then analysed the journeys through the lens of behavioural
science, annotating the video playback with the different cognitive biases
they observed.
After watching the recordings, we made an initial attempt at describing what
we’d seen. On a Post-It Note we drew the purchase trigger at the top and the
purchase itself at the bottom, and in the middle we drew this (below).
