More is not better
This is something I wanted to write about immediately after seeing the ‘read next’ section on Medium.
This is is how you should do it. Only one choice of the next post to read (I’m ignoring the two choices at the bottom since the first one is overwhelmingly more prominent than those). We encounter choice overload everywhere we go on the internet, so it’s nice when a site makes a decision for you.
I think many sites could benefit from adopting a single, or minimal, choice philosophy. Every decision the user has to make is a break in their flow, and a higher chance of them leaving your site completely. If you can keep that decision to one easy, quick, choice, you have a higher chance of them sticking around.
One contrasting argument to reducing choices might be “How do you know the user will like the one choice you give, wouldn’t it be better to give three of four choices?” I don’t necessarily think it is. When someone presents you with a bunch of choices, it demonstrates a lack of confidence. If you can’t decide what choice to go with, how will the end user?
But what if you aren’t confident enough to present the user with one choice / article to read? Say you wrote your ‘related post’ algorithm in one day and it’s rough around the edges. Well if that’s the case, just fake it. If no one is ever clicking through to a related article because you presented users with fifteen choices, the whole feature is going to be useless anyway. You can improve your algorithm with the feedback you receive from users actively using it.
The whole reason why I wrote this article is a testament to the minimal choice philosophy. After reading a Medium post, I clicked through to a related article. It was a breath of fresh air compared to what I am presented with elsewhere. Take the Next Web for example (sorry for picking on you guys!):
There are three different choices, all equally weighed, which makes deciding which post to read quite difficult.
I can think of a lot of other places this philosophy could be adopted. For Youtube related videos, after you finish watching a video, you are presented with a billion choices of the next video to watch:
Did YouTube ever think of presenting just one video? Surely they can look at my viewing history, combined with all the data about the related videos, and make a solid prediction of what I’ll want to watch next?
I’m not the first one to come up with the idea of limiting the choices for decisions. Apple’s entire product philosohpy is focused around this. And others have blogged about it before: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/too-many-choices/.
I just think a lot people don’t understand the value of limiting choices, yet. So if I can get just one person to see this value, then this blog post has achieved my goal.
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