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Comment by kettlecorn | Hacker News Reader

Stores like Walmart and Target are intentionally designed to be inefficient and maze like in an effort to get you spend more time browsing (and buying).

Facebook is the digital equivalent of that.

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A grid of shelved aisles with wider walkways connecting them is not maze like.

The milk is in the back on purpose, but products are grouped relatively sensibly too.

Yes, Ikea is far more annoyingly maze-like than Walmart or similar stores. In fact, it's so bad that I'll never hike through another Ikea again.

Actually, the IKEA nearest to me in Berlin was restructured some months ago and got rid of the maze, by adding a lot more shortcuts. They also have signs with a floor plan whenever you could take a shortcut.

Ikea stores are Hilbert curves, not mazes. Mazes have split paths and lots of dead ends, those features make them disorienting. Hilbert curves are a single twisty path, which only makes it long, but not disorienting.

The design of the path through the storey was not chosen to annoy you, but to make optimal use of display and saleroom space.

While the design may not have been chosen for that purpose, it does indeed annoy me. And I suspect that it was designed that way more to force people to look at the goods in every single department, rather than to optimize the use of space.

But yes, Hilbert curve rather than maze, makes sense.

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