Less is more: how fewer options can boost your sales

Introduction

Imagine you’re at your favorite grocery store and you spot a jam promotion. At the first display, you find 24 different flavors to choose from. Nearby, a competing display offers the same promotion but with only 6 flavors. Which one would you pick from?

A recent study revealed that 40% of grocery store customers purchased a jar from the 6-flavor display, while only 3% bought from the 24-flavor display. Presented with a larger selection, shoppers likely felt overwhelmed, experiencing decision paralysis.

The experiment shows that the number of choices impacts buying decisions and overall satisfaction. Too many options can overwhelm people, leading to frustration. Choosing one item out of many can feel like a loss of the alternatives, which decreases the perceived value of the selected product.

This issue is common in software design: Hick’s Law states that the more options you provide, the longer it takes for users to make a decision or take action. 

To solve the issue, UI/UX designers aim to simplify choices, enhance user experience, and speed up decision-making. This article will explore three practices to help you create more user-friendly designs and drive better business outcomes.

Practice #1: smart defaults

Smart defaults minimize the number of decisions required from the users by offering pre-set controls, content, or product options. With AI getting more powerful than ever, companies can tailor such defaults based on user data, creating deeply personalized experiences. Here’s a quick example of how Spotify, one of the pioneers in AI-driven personalization, goes about integrating smart defaults into its Home tab:

With recommendations front-and-center, navigating Spotify feels almost too easy, especially considering that the company’s media library has 100 million songs and 6 million podcast titles. Here’s how Spotify combines smart UX and powerful AI tech to achieve this effect:

1. Simple navigation. Spotify ensures that the most relevant and likely-to-be-enjoyed content is right there by customizing the Home tab with quick access to favorite songs, podcasts, and curated playlists.

2. Using AI and data to the max. Back in the day, Spotify poured millions into the development of proprietary ML solutions, making its content curations far superior to the competition. With AI-driven personalization provided by AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and similar platforms, this functionality is now accessible to a wide range of apps in areas like e-commerce, retail, SaaS, media, EdTech, and more.

By being closely linked to personalization, smart defaults contribute to KPIs that go beyond usability and choice management. According to industry stats, personalized apps benefit from 49% higher brand loyalty and generate 40% higher revenues on average. 

Practice #2: progressive disclosure 

UI/UX experts use progressive disclosure to manage the information load at every step of the UX journey. The key principle at play here is simple: always consider what actions and information are the most essential for a particular UX/UI context and only display those by default. If you need to include in-depth functionality, hide it behind a hamburger menu or a similar element. Doing so helps to declutter the UI, improve your users’ learning curve, and reduce potential mistakes.

Let’s take a social media app as a quick example. Typically, features such as a simple feed, messaging, notifications, and posting options would suffice for everyday use. Advanced features or settings, like user activity tracking or detailed analytics, can be accessed through an exploration of a menu. Instagram serves as a good example here.

Key steps to implement progressive disclosure the right way: 

• Identify the most critical information that users need at first glance.
• Design clear, intuitive pathways for additional details, using carousels, modal windows, tooltips, toggles, etc.
• Prioritize content hierarchically, making secondary details accessible through user interactions.
• Gather feedback and make iterative improvements based on user interactions and preferences.
• Maintain a balanced approach that considers diverse user needs, avoiding oversimplification.

Practice #3: search and filtering 

Product search and filters have been inseparable from e-stores for decades, which explains why this functionality looks and feels the same on 99% of e-commerce apps. When it comes to the 1% of innovators like Nike, however, filters get a lot more exciting.

Nike goes beyond basic options like brand, price, and ratings by offering category-specific filters that cater to the unique characteristics of each product. For instance, the shoe category has options such as shoe height, width, technology, and closure type, allowing users to quickly and easily narrow down their choices.

When working with filters, it can be easy to go overboard, overwhelming the users. Leveraging techniques like progressive disclosure and smart defaults can prevent this issue.

Along with avoiding cognitive overload, make sure your filtering options:

• Have consistent labels
• Update dynamically to reflect available search results
• Include a clear option to reset all filters with a single click
• Cover all relevant attributes to prevent limiting usability

Conclusion 

People enjoy exploring diverse experiences and dislike feeling constrained, which has prompted companies to offer a wide variety of products and services. However, the number of options that users can effectively manage at one time is often overlooked.

Our Design Studio leverages behavioral science and a data-driven approach to design and develop products that achieve up to a 3X return on investment.