From shopping experience to syntagm

I was thinking about shopping experience last night, (just for fun, and sometimes when I could not fall asleep, I do this kind of brain exercise), maybe it is very directly related with your post, sorry about this.

For traditional shopping, the store “designers” promote their business by design some routes or certain strategies. For example, milk was always put the another end of the store with the door or cashier desk, because they know much people buy milk when they shopping at a grocery store. This route strategy force customers to go through a bunch of other items, and attract them buy more things. Especially there is always something at the middle of the aisles. So go through some items maybe people don’t necessary needed becomes a part of the syntagm of shopping experience. And it seems that there is something similar with movie director’s camera. Both of them just put things there to force you to think about it or accept it.

For online shopping, because there is tool called “Search”, we could get whatever we want more directly and instantly. However, the “store” designers didn’t give up to attract us into their trap，knowing as we did that on line shoppers don’t always have a clear idea about what they are looking for. The designers model the traditional shopping experience by using the margin spaces and put their items in a specific list order at the left panel of their website I guess.

What I am really trying to articulate is that the syntagm is not always very economically logical. It means that we could always disorder or add something redundant and make the syntagm bigger and beneficial for “us”–maybe someone sells the paradigms, movie director, store manager…

I was thinking about shopping experience last night, (just for fun, and sometimes when I could not fall asleep, I do this kind of brain exercise), maybe it is very directly related with your post, sorry about this.

For traditional shopping, the store “designers” promote their business by design some routes or certain strategies. For example, milk was always put the another end of the store with the door or cashier desk, because they know much people buy milk when they shopping at a grocery store. This route strategy force customers to go through a bunch of other items, and attract them buy more things. Especially there is always something at the middle of the aisles. So go through some items maybe people don’t necessary needed becomes a part of the syntagm of shopping experience. And it seems that there is something similar with movie director’s camera. Both of them just put things there to force you to think about it or accept it.

For online shopping, because there is tool called “Search”, we could get whatever we want more directly and instantly. However, the “store” designers didn’t give up to attract us into their trap，knowing as we did that on line shoppers don’t always have a clear idea about what they are looking for. The designers model the traditional shopping experience by using the margin spaces and put their items in a specific list order at the left panel of their website I guess.

What I am really trying to articulate is that the syntagm is not always very economically logical. It means that we could always disorder or add something redundant and make the syntagm bigger and beneficial for “us”–maybe someone sells the paradigms, movie director, store manager…

How could HCI designer use syntagm?

I believe it is very useful for game designers to lead those gamers to jump into those scenarios one by one and feel very novel and exciting about the game.

I am sure there is a lot of more areas could benefit from excellent handling about syntagm, and hope I could come back to this post later.