Too many choices make your customers just stop with browsing. They don’t buy and move on! So if you have too many looky-loos and not enough purchasers, you may be giving them Choice Overload! Too many Free Trial users and not enough conversions? Choice Overload may be one of the problems in that case also. Whether you are an e-commerce business or designing a user interface, you may be overwhelming your intended audience with too many choices! Luckily there is a 4C approach, proven with social research, that may help you overcome this problem.
Here is a terrific TED talk by Social Researcher, Sheena Iyengar:
Sheena talks about experiments they did with handing out free samples of 6 different kinds of jam vs handing out 24 different kinds of jam. They found out that more people bought the jam when they were shown fewer choices, only 6 kinds of jam!
More people put money in retirement savings accounts when they were shown only a handful of retirement finds than when they were shown hundreds of options!
That’s the Choice Overload problem! Too many choices, people don’t choose and move on! Nice insights! But how do you overcome Choice Overload? Sheena recommends the 4C approach.
1. CUT – Cut the number of choices you are presenting. Whether it’s your e-commerce site or your user interface design, too many choices frustrate people. You need some choice, but too many choices may hurt your objective!
2. CONCRETIZE – Make your choices vivid! Don’t describe something. Show pictures of what happens when someone chooses something. Show the consequences of making a choice, not just more about the features of that choice. Talk about benefits of a choice!
3. CATEGORIZE – Chunk your choices into Categories that make it simple for your customers to narrow down what their choices are. Don’t overwhelm them with too many choices upfront! Make pre-defined combinations of packages where you could. In User Interface design, Wizards are a great example of making choices on behalf of the user, making it easier for them to start quickly.
4. CONDITION – Condition for Complexity! – Make simple choices easy to make and hide complex choices for later, once they have some experience with you.
Great research whose applicability can extend beyond just social research! Can help a lot in product start-up companies in designing and presenting choices or in designing user interfaces.
When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice – William James