Today’s post is by Coupa’s new UI expert, Casey.

This happens to me all the time…I’ll go into a new store with the intention of buying something and there are so many awesome items that I actually end up leaving without having bought anything.

In today’s society, we’ve got more choices than ever before. If I go to Amazon.com I can choose from over 1000 different HDMI cables without any clear indication of the differences between them. Previously getting married and having children was not even a question – these days everything is a choice.

The general consensus up to now has been that the more choices we have the happier we’ll be – but according to Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice we have, in fact, the opposite. All of these choices are a good thing – but at a certain point they start to become poisonous. Here are some downsides to our multitude of choices:

• Paralysis: You have so many options that you can’t make a choice.
  • Study: A grocery store tested out a food sampling strategy by alternating allowing customers to sample 24 flavors of jam vs 6. With the larger sampling – more people came to the table, but 1/10 as many people actually bought the jam.
  • Study: For every 10 mutual funds that are through a retirement account, employee’s participation in a 401(k) plan goes down 2%. They have so many choices, it’s even causing them to turn down free money.
• Decision Quality: When we have too many choices our original decision criteria go away and we tend towards the most simple.
  • Study: If you ask people in advance what they care most about a romantic partner – they will tell you many things that matter to them. They want someone who is smart, interesting, makes them laugh, kind, etc. After they evaluate 12 people against their criteria, they find it more difficult and end up simplifying it down to “how hot is he?”. They learn when they wake up the next morning that the criteria that are most simple aren’t the ones that end up mattering the most.
• Capability vs. Usability: People don’t know what’s good for them.
  • Study: People had to rate digital CD players. They were shown 3 players with 7, 14, and 21 features. At first, they were asked which they would prefer and clearly most of them chose the one with the most features. The people were then given the CD player with 21 features to play with for a while and were prompted again for a choice between the 3 options. They all chose the player with the 7 features. They all chose usability.

Most people don’t know what’s good for them. When people ask for certain features, I like to think about the reasons behind that request–maybe that particular feature is just a symptom of a different problem. Also, I think about whether this feature will actually add or detract from the application overall. Just because a user suggests a feature doesn’t mean they actually need it.

What does this mean for UI design? The more features an application has, the harder it is to hone in on getting a particular task completed. The Oracles and Aribas of this world have giant, custom applications that have every feature anyone has ever thought of (and more). Talk to anyone you know that uses these bloated apps and they’ll tell you how complex it can be.

The key is to come up with the most important features to get the job done and execute them correctly. Make it as simple as possible to get from the beginning of a flow to the end. Most importantly – the more decisions a user has to make on the homepage, the less likely they are to complete their intended flow. At each decision point, you will see a significant drop off in users. Tightening up all of the user flows will ensure people can make it all the way through to the desired result.