Why Too Many Choices Is A No-No In Product Design ?
As humans, we hate decisions that are imposed on us. Rather, we love being given choices as it gives us control (or at least creates an illusion of control) and makes us feel powerful.
That holds true in case of kids as well. Remember how as kids we loved when parents gave us choices though the outcome was unaffected by the choice we made ?
Now fast forward to the present.
Choices that make the selection a no-brainer, make the user feel stupid. And after all as humans, isn’t that an awful feeling to experience ?
On the other hand, multiple complex choices overwhelm the user as decision making gets tough, which eventually puts off the user.
Give the user a default choice and the user will tend to stick to it, thus increasing the share of that choice. Well, now that’s the power of inertia.
However, a smartly designed choice architecture plays an interesting role here.
Let’s look at a community of booklovers. Based on your rating of a book, you are given recommendations based on the preferences of other readers with similar tastes. That’s a method called ‘collaborative filtering’ in which you end up using judgements of people with similar taste to make a choice.
Wouldn’t it be a task to choose from the billion books without ‘collaborative filtering’ ?
