In the fascinating book The Art of Choosing, Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar performed an experiment testing the relationship between how many choices a person has, and how much they will ACT on that choice.
“I convinced [the manager of a grocery store] to let me conduct a study with a tasting booth…The large assortment [of jams] contained 24 of the 28 flavors made by Wilken & Sons….The small assortment consisted of six jams plucked from the large assortment…
"Another research assistant…observed people entering the store and recorded how many stopped to sample the jams. He found that 60 percent were drawn to the large assortment but only 40 percent to the small one…
"Meanwhile, at the booth, Irene and Stephanie encouraged customers to taste as many jams as they liked…
”[The assistant] noted that people who had sampled the large assortment were quite puzzled. They kept examining different jars, and if they were with other people, they discussed the relative merits of the flavors. This went on for up to 10 minutes, at which point many of them left empty-handed.
“By contrast, those who had seen only 6 jams seemed to know exactly which one was right for them….When we tallied the coupons…we discovered the following: 30 percent of the people who had seen the small assortment decided to buy jam, but only 3 percent bought a jar after seeing the large assortment.
"Even though the latter attracted more attention, more than 6 times as many people made a purchase when we displayed the smaller set of jams.”
Sampling the jam in the grocery store is exactly like stumbling across your company’s link. There’s a two to three second window when you can grab the user’s attention span and in which they’ll decide, “Is this for me?”. In that moment, you want to give them such a good experience that they stand around a little longer to find out how much the product costs.
A great example we see everyday is a homepage of a product. Get them engaged and inside the product as fast as possible - don’t bog down the user with tons of information and choices that they’re forced to digest before they can get a payoff.
That’s part of why Google won the web search arms race with their single search box - there’s tons more filtering and granularity in what I can do with my search results once I’ve got them…but at the start, all I can really do is Search. With Yahoo and Altavista and all the rest, there were so many categories to fall into that the user could easily get lost without getting the nugget they came to the site for.
But, you might ask, “Well, they don’t have to CLICK on any of these things…they’re just there if they want them, and they ignore things they don’t care about…and what happens if we DON’T include something that someone cares deeply about?”
Yes, but remember the jam experiment - the user didn’t HAVE to try all the jams in the larger 24 set, in order to purchase ONE of them. The choosing had just become an unpleasant experience - to evaluate so many different jams/statements/features is just exhausting for the average human being.
And didn’t the jam company just want the passer-by to buy SOMETHING from them? Try it out, keep the engagement with their jam brand longer? Let the jam become part of their everyday toast-spreading experience, and then the next time they’re in the store, they’ll be excited to expand their repertoire to the other flavors?
But, in 97% of the cases where the person walked away from the large assortment of jams WITHOUT buying anything, that potential customer’s engagement will be hard to capture from scratch again. The engagement with the brand has ended.
Same with a homepage - let the user become excited by the rich results they get, the core magic your product provides. You don’t have to tell them right away about all the incredible features that you’ve implemented and that they’ll love. Let them discover all the different things you’ve packed in as they continue to use the product. But if they feel overwhelmed and click away, that’s a user that may be hard to capture again.