You are presented with 100 blenders. You choose one to purchase. Two weeks later, you hear that the blender you’ve selected has been voted best blender of 2010! Nice feeling eh.
Alternatively, if you’d selected one of the others and found out that the best blender of 2010 was actually cheaper that the one you bought, you feel a little daft. This is known as buyer’s regret.
We all crave choice. We love the supermarket. We like to feel that we’re confronted with all the options – we don’t want to miss out. However, we all have a fear of making the wrong decision. This concept manifests itself online in many ways.
For example, if you offer a user multiple routes to navigate to content, the user will hesitate before choosing one. This hesitation typically takes longer than if they had simply pursued one route and clicked the back button if they’d gone wrong.
Why do they do this? They don’t want to make what they perceive as a mistake. They don’t want to feel stupid.
Clearly, the most obvious way it manifests itself is when buying online. Let’s take Amazon as an example. Millions of products are available which satisfies our need for the widest possible choice. However, left to our own devices, we’d become almost unable to choose for fear of buyer’s regret. Amazon (and most leading ecommerce brands) get around this by narrowing the choice down immediately.
I search for a blender. I have over 500 results. I’m thinking that I’ll certainly be able to find the one I need from that lot. I’m also starting to think about choosing the wrong one (and the amount of time I’m going to need to make my decision).
Luckily… I’ve got a range of ways to narrow down my options. I can filter by price, by brand and even by popularity. I know I’ve got about £20 to spend, so I narrow on price and select the filter option of between £15 and £50.
Ah, now I’ve got 232 results which Amazon helpfully tells me. Still too many, so now I’ll customise my price range to £15 to £25. And I trust other buyers (most of us follow the pack), so I’ll narrow down based on customer reviews. I now have 20 options. My last action is to check the best-selling ones, so I order them by using the drop down.
And I see the one I want. The chances of making a wrong decision are now minimised. I am confident to purchase and feel quite satisfied that I’ve invested a little effort in narrowing down my choices.
Conclusion – for information-led interfaces, minimise choice. For ecommerce, typically maximise choice but allow the user to narrow over several stages.
