Why do IKEA stores have one path?

A single one-way route takes you past every department, from the showrooms to the market hall and the warehouse, before you reach the checkouts.

What is the Gruen transfer?

The moment shoppers lose track of what they came for in a store layout and start buying things they hadn’t planned. It is named after the architect Victor Gruen.

When does guiding a user become trapping them?

When the way in is easy and the way out is hard, like easy sign-up with hard cancelling. The designer Harry Brignull originally called this a “roach motel”.

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Company story6 October 20265 min read

Why does IKEA walk you through every room?

One path past everything: how a store layout guides your steps, and where guiding a user turns into trapping them.

$Cover for “Why does IKEA walk you\nthrough every room?”: A store floor plan with one blue path that winds through every section to the exit.$

You go into IKEA to buy one shelf. Two hours later you leave with two candles, a plant and a storage box you didn’t know you needed. That didn’t happen by chance.

One path past everything

Most IKEA stores are built around a single, one-way route. You start in the showrooms upstairs, where furniture is set out in complete rooms. Then you go down through the market hall of smaller homewares and the warehouse, where you pick up the flat-pack boxes yourself. Last come the checkouts.

Arrows on the floor lead the way, and the exit only appears at the end.

Why the layout works

You see everything. You can’t reach what you came for without passing every other department.
You picture a home, not an item. A sofa isn’t shown alone but in a full room with a rug, a lamp and cushions, so you picture the whole scene and want the whole scene.
You forget your list. Researchers who study store layouts, such as Alan Penn at University College London, have described the route as maze-like: visitors lose track of what they came for and buy things they hadn’t planned. Retail calls this the “Gruen transfer”, after the architect Victor Gruen.

Even so, many IKEA stores also mark shortcuts between departments, for people who know what they want.

The same thing on a screen

Digital products draw paths too: sign-up steps, checkout, an app’s first-run setup. A clear path helps people focus and reduces mistakes.

But the line between guiding users and trapping them is thin. When signing up is easy and cancelling is hard, or the back button disappears, the path becomes what the designer Harry Brignull originally called a “roach motel”: easy to get into, hard to get out of.