With so much of our lives spent trying to choose from oversized lists of options, why not make your website simpler? Here’s what you can do to reduce decision fatigue and make your website easier to say “yes” to.
It sort of feels like our lives are nothing more than an endless string of decision-making, doesn’t it? You go to the grocery store and half an aisle is dedicated to olive oil. Or cereal. Or yogurt. Then, you go home and your streaming services give you literally hundreds of options for horror movies. Or documentaries. Or TV shows. And it doesn’t get any better online.
Decision fatigue happens when you put your consumer in the position to choose from an over-abundance of options.
That said, decision fatigue isn’t some minor frustration caused by having too many awesome choices. It can do some major harm to your conversion rate. For instance: Hick’s Law states that with each new option you put before a user, the longer it will take them to process all of their choices.
That’s the opposite of what you want to happen on a website. You want visitors to quickly explore, find exactly what they need, and convert. The longer you delay this, the lower your chances will be to convert them at all.
Or, you might find that too many choices lead visitors to make poor buying decisions.
This happens when there are too many similar-looking options or there’s an excess of information and the customer gives up. They know they need to buy something, so they make a hasty purchase just to “get it over with”. As a result, the company ends up having to deal with more returns and refunds because of unsatisfied customers. And they will cost you.
Your website already has enough competition to contend with, so why create competition for your visitors’ attention internally?
What Web Designers Can Do to Reduce Design Fatigue
If you or your client want your website to convert, you really need to think about the ways you’re forcing them to stop and wonder: “Which one do I choose?”
Whether your website sells content, services, or products, less is always going to be more in terms of decision-making. And this isn’t about how many products you sell on a website. This is about how you frame every individual decision leading up to conversion.
Here are some examples of where decision fatigue may take place and how to reduce friction there:
1. CLEAR UP THE NAVIGATION
With smaller websites and more narrowly-focused businesses, you won’t have to worry about this too much. With big stores, however, the navigation can get you into a lot of trouble if you don’t organize it well. – Read more
