Universal Principles of UX

24

Make the choice easy.

The first time I walked through a supermarket in Atlanta, Georgia, I felt paralyzed. Being from the Netherlands, I was not used to seeing such an overwhelming number of options for cereal, jam, cheese, or toilet paper. I must have spent at least an hour trying to figure out what cheese to buy. Choice is good, but too much choice stresses us out and prolongs our decision-making process.

This psychological phenomenon is referred to as Hick’s law, named after early 1950s experimentations around choice by psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman. It applies to situations in which decisions are actually not that important (like me choosing the right cheese), but it doesn’t apply to decisions that carry heavier consequences ...