Okay, so the other day I was messing around with this idea of figuring out where people go when they’re wandering around a shopping mall. You know, like, how do they move from store to store? What’s the flow? I thought it might be cool to see if I could map that out. I’ve been reading a bit about some tech, and I had these Bluetooth beacons lying around from a previous project, so I figured, why not give it a shot?

First thing I did was grab those beacons. I only had five of them, which isn’t a lot, but it’s enough for a test. I placed them strategically around my own small office, which would act as my mini-mall for this experiment. I put one near the entrance, one by the coffee machine (because that’s a popular spot!), one near the main work area, another by the meeting room, and the last one near the exit.

Then, I needed a way to track. I whipped up a quick and dirty app for my phone that could listen for the signals from these beacons. The app was pretty basic – it just logged the beacon ID and the time whenever it came within range of one. I’m no coding wizard, but I got it done.

For a few days, I carried my phone around the office as I went about my normal routine. To simulate more traffic, I asked a couple of my colleagues to do the same. We were all just walking around, grabbing coffee, having meetings, you know, the usual. The app on our phones was silently collecting data in the background.

After collecting data for three days, I dumped all that info into a spreadsheet. I started playing around with the data, trying to make sense of it. I used some simple formulas to figure out the sequence of beacons each phone encountered and how long it stayed near each one. It was a bit messy, but I could start to see some patterns.

To visualize it, I drew up a basic map of my office and marked the beacon locations. Then, using different colored lines for each person, I traced their paths based on the beacon sequence. It wasn’t super precise, but it gave a rough idea of movement within the office.

Here’s what I found out:

  • Most of us hit up the coffee machine right after coming in. No surprise there, right?
  • People tended to linger in the main work area the longest, which makes sense.
  • The meeting room was used less frequently, but when it was, people stayed put for a good chunk of time.

It was a fun little project, and it got me thinking about the possibilities. If I had more beacons and a more sophisticated app, I could probably get a much clearer picture of how people navigate a real shopping mall. Maybe even identify bottlenecks or popular routes. Of course, there are privacy things to consider, but as a proof of concept, it was pretty neat. I might revisit this in the future when I have more time and resources. Who knows, maybe there’s something to this whole customer path tracking thing!