Journal
What a pause at a shelf actually tells you
A pause is a mark on a floor plan, not a personality. In a clothes shop on a Saturday, people stop at a mirror because the light is kind, because a friend is in the changing room, or because the rail behind them is too tight to pass. If I write “interested in jackets” every time someone stops, the drawing lies.
On an observation day I use three ticks: touch, hover, ask. Touch means the garment or the loaf left the shelf. Hover means the feet stopped and the hands did not take. Ask means they turned to a person, not to a label. Those three columns survive a briefing. “Engagement” does not.
Empty-handed exits after a hover at the same shelf, repeated across two hours, are worth a sentence on the sheet. One hover is weather. A queue that forms because two people are photographing a display is not a pause at all; it is a blockage, and we mark it as a blockage so the owner does not order more of the thing being photographed.
If you want this kind of looking-at in your own rooms, the longer commission is the customer behavior study. Bring a floor that actually has shelves people can pause at; a hatch with no browsing surface will not teach us much.