Info 202 F12

1)   

Andronico’s is organized by 2 physical
principles and 2 content principles. The first physical principle organizes the
biggest staple food items, like milk, lunchmeats and bread at the back of the
store. Not only do many Americans eat sandwiches for lunch, they also use milk
for breakfast and coffee. More importantly, families will buy these items
frequently when kids are at home. By having frequently replenished foods in the
back, families with kids are forced to walk by entire aisles of food to get
milk or bread, which can pressure parents to buy other things on impulse. The
second physical principle is keeping cold things like cheese, ice cream and
meats near each other. Keeping cold things near each other allows for easy electrical
wiring for the store. The first content principle breaks up most contents by
“food” and “other”. The “other” allows entire aisles to contain things like
personal health objects and paper products. “Foods” contain anything edible as
well as things to cook with. The next principle is pairing “like objects”
together. Pairing things like snacks can bring together pretzels and chips,
while infant needs can contain both diapers and baby’s first hard food in
cereals. When you combine the two content principles, one can see there are 2.5
aisles of “other like objects” and many other aisles of “like food objects”.
Using that logic, the “other” aisles are: personal health, home needs, and
paper. The food aisles contain things like: snacks, drinks, cooking needs and
cold foods.

2)   

Amazon is also organized by 2 physical
principles and 2 content principles. Given that there is unlimited theoretical
space on a page, the first physical principle organizes the contents into a
list as compared to a picture form or other forms. This allows the interface to
look cleaner while having all the links under an Amazon orange color scheme.
Examples of things listed are everything under “kindle” and “books”. Within
this same scheme, at the bottom of the page are pictures of “recently seen”
objects by the user. This is in picture form because these are real products
not just a category of products like the links above. The second physical
principle puts things the user may already want at the bottom of the page
(recently history). This forces the user to scroll past every category to see
their history. While passing all of these links a user may see a category they
like, thus distracting them further to look at more products. The first content
principle is to group “like” things together. Each orange heading provides a
new “like” object group. Like things include “kindle” “audible audiobooks” and
“sport and outdoors”. It becomes evident that when Amazon organized “like”
things, the very first column contains amazon products, while the last entire
column contains all physical objects. By splitting between “digital” and
“non-digital”, Amazon allows itself to phase from digital to physical. The
second column still contains all digitized things including digital books
within the “book” section. The third column is a transition from digital to
physical. The last content principle was to have an “other” list in between the
lists and history. This “other” contains gifts, ways to sell and most
importantly bargains. This other is a buffer to catch the users eye before they
go to their history and contains a vast amount things that can easily make
someone want to stop and view the contents.

3)   

Given that Andronico’s and Amazon deal in the
two different dimensions of “meat space” and “cyberspace”, the principles of
physical organization will be different. Andronico’s is  an organization that has to worry about
shrinkage and spoilage of the products in the organized space, while Amazon
does not. Amazon may have to worry about these things at its warehouse, but it
should not worry them at the point of sale. Andronico’s has to worry about how
to store items that cannot react well to cold/ heat. This makes pairing
complementary items like milk and cereal hard to do, while Amazon could easily
put a kindle and e-book on an interface together with no consequence. What
makes the organization so interesting is that both the grocery store and the
Internet store share many content principles and a physical principle. The
concept of pairing “like objects” is evident in both systems. What makes the
systems different is how each defines what is consider similar. In the food
store, a “like object” could be “things that need to be frozen” or “drinks”,
yet Amazon is not bounded by the properties of the physical objects, nor any
sort of virtual property. When evaluating all the products, both systems
conceptually begin at a first split. In Andronico’s, the split is between
“food” and “other” while Amazon splits “digital” and “non-digital”. These
splits give the company power to provide an interface that their customers could
work with ease given the space provided. The physical property that both stores
share is making the customer work for what they want. Andronico’s forces people
to walk by other products to get to milk and meat, yet Amazon forces the user
to scroll down to look at “recent history”. By making the user seek out what
they already want, they are more likely to buy something on impulse while en
route.

4)   

The principles can be easily abstracted to fit
both kinds of stores. First, the company should make the customer work for what
they want, making it possible for impulse buys en route to what they already
want. Next, given either a bounded or unbounded space, it is best to organize
the system to provide the prospective users with the most ease. On a conceptual
level, every system needs to begin organizing with a “split” of fundamental
ideas. This is how the company starts organizing by identifying the first classifications
of things. Lastly, it is best to pair “like objects” together, that allows
people to find complementary things