Less is more? The paradox of choice — Behavioural economics in UX
People often think more means more. Often, however, the opposite is true: the more choices we have, the higher our expectations become — and the more we worry about making the ‘wrong’ decision. Enter the ‘Paradox of Choice’.
An interesting study was published in 2000 by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper from Columbia and Stanford University. On a regular day at a local food market, people would find a display table with 24 different kinds of jams. Then on another day, at that same food market, people were given only 6 different types of jam choices.
Which display table lead to more sales?
With fewer options, 40% of the shoppers tried the jams and 30% made a purchase. With more options, 60% tried the jams, but just 3% made a purchase!
The conclusion: “choice is alluring but confusing”. Customers given too many choices are ten times less likely to buy!
What does this mean?
Keep things simple, limit options and keep testing.
As we can see, when we’re given more options, we are less likely to choose. Why? Because we suffer from ‘choice paralysis’.
More choice requires more time and effort. This can lead to anxiety, stress, unhappiness or even regret if a poor choice is made. It’s hard and it’s difficult to make a good decision when you’re overwhelmed with information and options. You can’t process it effectively.
Instead of the risk of making a poor choice, we choose not to make a choice at all. No action is taken when the cognitive effort to compare all the options is too great.
Too much choice = no choice at all
Less choice = more satisfaction
Let’s have a look at some real-UX examples.
The Google search screen is the best example of how great user experience can be if choices are limited. There is only one thing you can do — it is extremely easy. Whenever you’re struggling with your designs, think about this design, how logical it is and how streamlined the user journey begins.
APPLE
The biggest feature of Apple’s influential web design is its minimalism. Apple keeps it simple by using large areas of white space and big margins to focus on single areas of content. Apple doesn’t want to push everything onto you at once. Instead, they want you to click through to the individual product page where they can show off more information.
AIRBNB
When you enter the Airbnb website and you just want to check the apartment’s availability, you won’t be disturbed.
APP STORE APPS
When you visit any mobile app’s site on AppStore, you can find many different in-app purchases. When you explore your iTunes settings on iPhone, you can find even more than that. You can find all the offers that the developer provides. However, you don’t want to force the user to choose one from let’s say 30 options. Usually, subscription-based apps show from one to three plans that the user can choose. It is a good practice that fights with the ‘choice paralysis’ and engages the user to choose. The one or another option. But it engages to choose :)
If you want to explore the paradox of choice from a sociological point of view, I recommend you watching psychologist Barry Schwartz’s Ted Talk where he takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.
If you are curious about behavioural economics in UX check my latest articles about the peak-end rule and the default effect.
