The mall, Disney World, and other attractions can often become a source of inspiration for churches looking to create an engaging or appealing atmosphere. Yet there is some danger in merely copying what you like if you do not understand the science behind why it was done in the first place. The corporate world creates environments not only for appeal but to generate specific responses from the individuals who interact with them.

For example, one church I have visited incorporated floor to ceiling mirrors in their hallways, but I am sure that they were unaware that mirrors make people slow down (which can lead to some frustrating hallway congestion for church visitors). Knowing the science behind corporate environments can not only save your church from creating facility problems but also enable your church to create more user-friendly churches. Of course, churches must never use this knowledge to take advantage of people as retailers do. Instead, it must be used to create a more user-friendly experience for guests.

Coolz0r recently highlighted an A-Z list of Retail Tricks to Make You Shop that offers a few techniques that can be used by churches to learn how to avoid creating frustrating facilities and instead create user-friendly environments. These techniques include:

• Flooring - Types of flooring are often used to direct customers as a retailer wants around the store. Department stores make great use of the difference between carpet and linoleum to subtly steer customers around and hold them in certain places. Occasionally you will find random rugs and mats laid out in aisles of supermarkets to slow traffic.
  For Churches: Your church’s flooring will determine how people will navigate and occupy your building. Look for ways to ease post-service congestion.
• Line of Sight - Advertisers make great use of line of sight, by working out, or subliminally pushing, a customer to a particular position. The customer will then find promotional material or displays directly between them and where they wish to go, the stairs, exit, cashier etc.
  For Churches: Put information desks, kiosks, maps, and other information vital to guests in their line of sight.
• Mirrors - Mirrors slow people down. Due to humans vain nature mirrors are regularly used on the front of shops in shopping centres and high streets to slow down the traffic and make people spend time in front of the shop.
  For Churches: If your church uses mirrors for decoration, be sure they are not causing traffic problems.
• Right - Upon walking through the Zone of Transition (see below) most customers will veer to the right (US research). Some think it is because the majority of people are right handed.
  For Churches: Be sure that your signage and other important information accommodate people’s tendency to go right. However, be sure to first observe how people interact with your facility. People may not go right if other variables are strong enough to counteract this tendency.
• Visual Prompting - Using the lines between laminate flooring, or carpet patterns shops often try to guide you around as they wish. WH Smiths on Oxford Street in London has a giant arrow cut into the carpet with laminate floor guiding you straight to the centre of the store. Niketown also uses this idea with lines across the floor silently ushering people.
  For Churches: Again, consider how your flooring navigates people.
• Xylophone - Instore music is set at a tempo to relax customers and slow their sense of time. Often music is wordless in order to avoid making customers think, instead just setting the tempo of shopping.
  For Churches: If your church plays music, be sure it is not creating undesired results.
• Zone of Transition - The area just through the doors of a shop, which it takes a customer to acclimatise to the shop surroundings and truly enter the shop. Merchandise, baskets and promotions in the area are lost on the customer, who has not fully transferred from outside yet.
  For Churches: Guests will be disoriented when they first enter your church. Do not place guest information right past the doorway or they probably will not see it.

If this interests you, read Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. It will teach you principles of how to observe how people interact with your church. A few nuggets from this book include:

• There are certain physical and anatomical abilities, tendencies, limitations and needs common to all people, and the retail environment must be tailored to these characteristics.
• To say whether a sign or any in-store media works or not, there’s only one way to assess it - in place. On the floor of the store.
• You can’t just look around your store, see where there are empty spots on the walls and put signs there. Every store is a collection of zones, and you must map them out before you can place a single sign. Each zone is right for one kind of message and wrong for all others. Putting a sign that requires twelve seconds to read in a place where customers spend less than four seconds is just slightly more effective than putting it in your garage.
• When it comes to positioning a sign, the difference between an ideal viewing spot and a terrible one is often just a few feet.
• The smart store is designed in accordance with how we walk and where we look. It understands our habits of movement and takes advantage of them, rather than ignoring them or, even worse, trying to change them.

How well is your church designed for human interaction?