Hick’s Law
Why having too many choices slows down decisions and increases anxiety, and how to apply Hick's Law to boost conversions by simplifying options.
In this issue
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Turkey’s Olympic team got a new star yesterday. A 51–old–shooter who casually came out with no gear and hand in pocket—and won a silver medal with an iconic pose.
Just another proof that age is but a number. And it’s never too late to peak.
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Have you ever opened a streaming app and found yourself scrolling through a plethora of movies or shows you’d watch for half an hour or more?
Sometimes, you don’t even play anything.
That’s Hick’s Law in action.
Named in the 1950s after American psychologist William E. Hick, this law describes the phenomena where the time it takes for you to make a decision increases with the number of choices presented.
So when you:
- Find yourself spending too much time in the mall searching for a perfect pair of shoes.
- Can’t decide on which vacuum cleaner to buy based on tons of Google reviews.
- Browse Netflix endlessly.
… It’s all Hick’s law taking place.
With Hick in mind, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper ran an experiment in 2000.
First day, they displayed 24 gourmet jams in an upscale food market and asked customers to sample each one for a $1 coupon. On the second day, they displayed only 6 jams.
The results:
- The larger display attracted more people, but converted 3% of total customers.
- The smaller display attracted fewer people, but converted 30% of total customers.
More choice may attract more people, but less choice leads to a higher conversion rate.
The more someone has to think, the less likely they are to make a decision—or purchase.
Your task as a marketer: Simplify your customers’ decision-making. Let’s see how.
Three ways you can leverage Hick’s Law
Limit their options
Head and Shoulders saw sales increase by 10% as soon as it reduced the number of shampoo variants from 26 to 15 in the early 2000s.
So if you offer multiple variants of a product, try reducing them.
What if your business needs to have multiple options? That’s fine. But you should try to simplify customer choices in other ways.
For example, you might sort your services in categories and create filters so your customers can limit options themselves.
Personalize choices
It’s your job to present your customers with the best possible option.
That’s especially important when there’s a lot to choose from. Amazon solves this with the “suggested for you,” section and the total price of “frequently bought together” items.
Remember how we mentioned scrolling streaming services? Well, Amazon also tries to group and personalize options relative to users. Netflix, Spotify, and other streaming services do this as well.
What can you do? Segment your email listbased on how users interact with your products. This can be a good way to limit options and get users to buy.
There’s also the possibility your CMS platform has an integrated recommendation tool in the form of a widget, or even a personalized quiz:
Simplify complex processes
The biggest conversion killer online? A page that makes you anxious just looking at it.
If you’re driving traffic to a landing page, make the conversion goal obvious and easy to spot.
Home Chef, for example, works hard to simplify your decision as soon as you land on their website:
You can pick your meals, or you can take a quiz that will make meal-picking even easier.
The same goes for other processes…
If you’re encouraging someone to sign up, do it step-by-step. Don’t serve them a form with 15–20 empty fields they need to fill. Make the fields simple and easy to understand.
The same goes for a checkout page, where you can use a progress bar to make the entire process user-friendly:
Yes, shoppers love to see their progress as they make a purchase. Leverage that.
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ICYMI, last time we looked at the Fear Appeal.
The “Choice anxious” Crew
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