Behavioural Science Principle 2: Choice Paralysis

The time and effort it takes to make a decision increases with the number of options presented. Sometimes this is also known as decision paralysis or analysis paralysis.

When customers have too much choice the cognitive load is high. For example, a company offering 3 credit cards may find they get higher take-up than a competitor company offering 15 cards.

Brands need to consider the total amount of mental effort that is required from a user (cognitive load) to complete a task, otherwise the user may bounce right off the website altogether!

At the root of the problem is the fear of making the wrong choice and perhaps missing out on a better deal, but more seriously, the concern that the wrong choice will lead to something bad happening (I end up with unmanageable interest payments).

The starting point of course is ‘it depends’ and ‘context matters’. There’s no simple or obvious answer. Usually, a degree of common sense will provide an initial guide on whether the number of options could be increased or are too many. The middle ground though can be quite large and even that common sense around the boundaries can be tricky as what really counts is what your customers think, not you.

You want to help people find the most relevant product for themselves, and so you often see these days a ‘best for…’ approach. Applied to credit cards you get a:

It improves the discoverability of the most salient product benefits for each individual and further down the line improves your conversion rate.

Another approach is a selection ‘wizard’ where the customer is asked a series of questions resulting in a recommendation for one or a limited number of products.

Confused.com use clever techniques like ‘chunking’ to break down the choice process into more manageable sections. Below they set the expectation of the user – there will be three stages in this journey:

Providing filters also helps. ASOS provides lots of information about clothing items in expandable content sections (bottom right of the screenshot below). This looks a lot less daunting for customers and enables them to choose if they want to read more information.

It is important to note that a lot of the magic is in the choice of filters and whether they are configured correctly. If a customer wants to select on material type but it’s not there, then they’ll leave. Equally for other products if the weight of some is listed in kilograms, but for others in pounds, then again you’ll lose sales.

Bear in mind that if you split your content into too many steps and ask users to keep making decisions, they may experience ‘decision fatigue’ and lose the ability to make rational decisions, completely giving up on the purchase.

As a fundamental principle think about how you can address that fear of disaster or missing out from making the wrong choice.

Simplifying information is our middle name! Give us a shout if you think any of these would be helpful: