Making the least lucrative seem super lucrative!
So, while I was doing this crash course on User Psychology, I came across something called the ‘decoy effect’. This effect exploits our cognitive bias to make an option seem superior, with the addition of an inferior ‘decoy option’.
Consider the following example, you go to a theater with your family to watch a nice movie. During the interval, your child insists on having a tub of popcorn. You don’t really want to invest in the expensive in-theater snacks, more so buying something such as a popcorn tub, but then you don’t want your child to keep cribbing either, so you decide to go to go to the snacks counter to buy a tub of popcorn. And there you are given the following two options:
The small tub is for 10$ and the big one, which is a bit more than double the size of the small one, is priced 20$. Both options are pretty rational and not really wanting to spend on popcorn in the first place(let alone 20$!), you’ll definitely choose to buy the cheapest i.e. the 10$ one.
But what if there was a third option, i.e. a medium-sized popcorn tub which is a bit bigger than the small tub, but half the size of the large one, and is priced as follows:
Though you don’t intend to spend much on popcorn, now you’ll start thinking of buying the large tub. Getting double the amount for just a couple of extra bucks? Who wouldn’t take that! And thus majority of us would end up buying a 20$ tub, which not only exceeds our budget, but also exceeds our required quantity.
This is what the decoy effect does. The theater knows that no one’s ever gonna buy the medium sized tub(the decoy option), but adding it makes buying the large tub(the most expensive option) feel like a much better deal.
Quite a lot of e-commerce websites have been using this effect on their pricing page to make the most profitable deal seem the best. Some companies even go to the extent of adding a couple of decoy options, which makes the only offer they want users to choose standout, thus providing them with options, but rendering the choice making only an illusion.
Even companies like Apple use this trick to make people buy the more expensive product thus boosting their sales and profit.
As a UX designers, our main objective apart from providing a good overall design, is to help improve the business. And this technique surely helps in not only making users choose the most profitable deal, but also helps increase the conversion rate by making the ordinary deals seem super lucrative.
