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Bring the door to the front
Threshold resistance
Alexander Taubman's grandfather, who started a real estate business after World War II and became an early pioneer of retail, called this threshold resistance. The threshold is the entrance to the store, and every step up or dark hallway makes a shopper less likely to cross it.
Stores used to be designed the other way around. Big windows held the merchandising, and the door sat at the back, reached through some dark alley. His fix was to bring the door to the front with no threshold at all.
What half a step costs
He broke it down almost like a math equation: even half a step up cut the number of people coming in by about twenty percent. The goal was to make going in so easy and so magical that shoppers walk in and spend more, which is good for the store.
Carrying it to AI
The same logic carries over to technology. Taubman's company, Long Lake, builds its AI platform to be easy enough that team members simply use it, which means minimizing threshold resistance on AI adoption.
How did the enclosed mall change store entrances?
Victor Gruen, an Austrian-born architect, designed Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956 and is widely called the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled mall in the United States. Shoppers entered through a few doors from the parking lot and then walked indoor corridors with no weather to face. Each store opened onto the corridor with a glass front, so reaching a shop meant stepping across a level floor.
Why do small barriers cut online purchases?
The Baymard Institute, which compiles checkout research, puts average online cart abandonment near 70 percent. Its studies list extra form fields, forced account creation, and surprise costs among the reasons shoppers leave. Each added step is another point where someone can drop out. Amazon was granted a patent on its 1-Click ordering in 1999, built around removing steps from checkout.
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