Reducing Choices and Increasing Conversions
A version of this article appears on Purple, Rock, Scissors.
Have you ever stopped to think how many choices you make daily? For example, my friend asks me out to eat. I have to decide not only at what time, but how quick the service will be. Should it be elegant and full service, or quick and affordable? Restaurants closer to his home or mine? Is there traffic? Italian, Chinese, or Mexican? Then, once I get to the restaurant, I’m given a menu with more than 50 options, and they allow me to substitute items that make the combinations infinite. At this point, the best option seems to be staying home with ice cream and Netflix. But, what flavor? And don’t even get me started on what show.
“A little child will cry equally when confined in too small a space or left to wander in a large and empty warehouse.” — Bruce Tognazzini, mentions in First Principles of Interaction Design
Within user experience design and information architecture, it can be quite difficult to find the balance between offering the user autonomy and the tyranny of choice. It’s the fine line between restricting their choice so they feel constrained versus offering them an overwhelming navigation menu with a hundred items. Let’s explore what we know about how people make decisions to help us make decisions about site architecture.
Human Memory
The mind cannot hold too many items in its short-term memory. Don Norman provides a model in The Design of Everyday Things: “There are 5 memory slots in short-term memory. Each time a new item is added, it occupies a slot, knocking out whatever was there beforehand.” Although the actual amount varies, this model helps us design interfaces for human use. A rule of thumb is to limit main navigation elements to five to seven items. This helps to lighten the user’s cognitive load, which makes choosing where to click quicker and easier.
Reduce Choice
We can determine calls to action on sites by understanding how people make decisions. Too many choices presented to a user can make them feel overwhelmed, thus making it more attractive to not make a choice at all. “When Choice is Demotivating” is a study that proves just that. A table featuring 24 varieties of jam was set up next to a table offering 6 varieties of jam. Both tables saw roughly the same amount of activity from customers trying free samples. The difference? The table offering 6 varieties sold more jam! The buyers struggled to make a choice at the table selling 24 varieties, because there were too many options, making it harder to judge a single product’s relative merit.
Mapping User Flows
How do we implement choice reduction in site architecture and design? A method I use is creating a user flow for every persona. Ensuring a clear path for each persona will hone in what your users are looking for without overwhelming them with information or choice. A good example of this is in Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, where designers specifically designed the rolling suitcase for flight attendants who had a specific need for a suitcase that was small and easy to carry throughout the airport. Eventually, they realized that the needs for flight attendants were the same for almost all people that travel, thus making it a brilliant product.
Creating Taxonomies
Another way of reducing choice is by grouping similar items together and labeling those groups, otherwise known as a taxonomy. Just as you’d expect to walk into a grocery store and find almond milk within the milk section within the dairy section, users expect to find a hierarchal classification of information on a website. The best thing you can do for your users is to actually do user tests to get their correct sense of information grouping. You’ll never know if your users never found the almond milk they were searching for because they’ve always looked in the nut section.
Applying Consumer Psychology
It’s crucial that UX designers and architects understand anchoring, framing, and the endowment effect to help reduce the user’s burden of decision making. If selling a particular product or service is the goal, then making the decision clear is not just within the product description — it’s how the product or service is positioned throughout the entire site.
Anchoring
Creating a price point for users to help them understand the value of your product is often referred to as anchoring. If you see on a website that most services cost $35/month, and see one for $18/month, that second service seems like a great deal! However, the same deal ($18/ month) may be on another site, but who offer other plans costing as low as $6/month. Where an $18 plan seemed affordable in the first scenario, it feels expensive in the second.
An example from Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice: A catalog was selling a bread maker for $279. It then later offered a newer and enhanced version for $429. Sales for the newer version were absolutely terrible, but the old bread maker sales doubled! The new bread maker had become the anchor, making the old one seem like a great bargain.
Anchoring is implemented by simply limiting wide product ranges and only showing a few at a time. A common practice is what I like to call the “Goldilocks Price Offering,” where three packages are ordered from lowest to highest. One is cheap with fewer offerings, one is expensive with probably more than you need, and the middle one is just right. Another easy and effective tactic is when having a sale section on an e-commerce site and ensuring the full price is slashed out beside the current price. Who doesn’t like a good deal?
Framing
Coined by researchers Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, framing is the language used to position items. In another example from Paradox of Choice, two gas stations are across the street from each other. One sign reads, “Discount for paying cash! Cash — $1.45/gallon and Credit — $1.55/gallon,” while the other one reads, “Cash — $1.45/gallon and Credit $1.55/ gallon.” To the customer, it appears the second is placing a surcharge for using credit, whereas the first gas station is offering a discount for using cash.
Framing doesn’t always come in the form of vernacular directly related to pricing. For a site I’m currently working on, I decided to not use the word “pain” in a drop-down in regards to surgery topics, and chose to say, “level of comfort” instead. As a rule of thumb, try not to use words that can be perceived as negative.
The Endowment Effect
Lastly, my favorite is the endowment effect because it works on me most of the time. Studies show that offering money-back guarantees and hassle-free returns gets more people to buy in store. Why? Most people won’t bother to return those items. Returning something can feel like we’re losing something, and it affects our psyche greatly, so companies can afford to offer these courtesies because enough don’t take advantage of them. Offering these courtesies makes our decisions feel less permanent, so we feel better about the possibility of making a mistake knowing we can return or cancel at any time.
We can implement the endowment effect on the web with CTAs that don’t shy away users with commitment. Buttons that read, “Try it out” or “Use our demo” can really put the endowment effect into, well, full effect. Letting your users know about your return policy and how to cancel up front can give that little nudge to users who are indecisive about purchasing.
Make Good (and Less) Choices
“More is less.” — Ben Schwartz
We shouldn’t confuse the amount of choices with freedom of choice. Give users the control and autonomy they desire, but limit the burden of decision making. Remove giant lists of items and group them into smaller lists, anchor price points so users know how to compare your products, allow your users to cancel at any time, and most importantly, test these methods on your actual users. Let the information architects and user experience designers process the decisions for their users to make a more usable product and increase conversions.
Oh, and by the way, we ended up eating sushi.
Recommended Resources
“The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman
“The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” by Ben Schwartz
Gawande, A. (1999). Whose body is it anyway? The New Yorker, October 4, 83–95.
First Principles of Interaction Design
