The tendency for people to get overwhelmed when they are presented with a large number of options, often used interchangeably with the term paradox of choice.
Choice Overload is a psychology concept closely related to Hick’s Law.
Takeaways
- Too many options hurts users’ decision-making ability. How they feel about the experience as a whole can be significantly impacted as a result.
- When comparison is necessary, we can avoid choice overload by enabling side-by-side comparison of related items and options that require a decision (e.g. pricing tiers).
- We can avoid choice overload by optimizing our designs for the decision-making process and avoid overwhelming users by prioritizing the content that’s shown to them at any given moment (e.g. featured product), providing tools for narrowing down choices up front (e.g. search and filtering).
Origins
Overchoice or choice overload is the paradoxical phenomenon that choosing between a large variety of options can be detrimental to decision making processes. The term was first introduced by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock.