Designing Interactions that Help Customers in Decision Making

Stefano Bussolon

Yes - No - Maybe
Do you need more information?

The goal of information architecture is to maximize the quantity and quality of information, and to minimize the cost and effort to find it.

Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not truth,
Truth is not beauty,
Beauty is not love,
Love is not music,
and Music is the best.
Frank Zappa, "Packard Goose"

Information becomes knowledge if it helps an agent to take a decision.

Finding the information is the first step in decision making.
Making a choice is the second step.
Information architecture should help user not just to find things, but also to make the right choice. From findability to choosability

You fancy some chocolate, so you decide to go and buy it.
Would you prefer to go to a shop with a huge number of options, or just few types of chocolate?

Eliminating the low selling products (up to 54%)

• same perception of variety
• increased sales (+10%)

Is this the end of the long tail?

Chernev 2003 distinguishes 3 types of consumers

• Consumer A already chose what she wants, and she just needs to find it out.
• Consumer B knows her preferences, but she need to make the choice.
• Consumer C is not aware of which attributes are important in the decision process.

The consumer A, who already knows what she is looking for, is more satisfied of her purchase if she can choose from a greater assortment of products.

Consumers B and C prefer to choose among a more limited selection of products.

How can we interpret this seemingly paradoxical outcome?

A greater assortment is considered, per se, positive.

Choosing from many alternatives is a demanding cognitive task

• identify all the pertinent attributes
• assess a weight (importance) to every attribute
• calculate the weighted sum for every alternative
• choose the alternative with the higher weighted sum

• identify all the attributes: designer, experts, other users.
• assess the weights: the user (with designed defaults)
• calculate the expected value for every alternative: the application
• sort the alternatives by their value: the application

The goal of an heuristic is to improve the ratio between decision accuracy and costs (time, memory, cognition, computation)

Ecological rationality

• Examining fewer attributes
• Reducing the cost of retrieving and storing cue values
• Simplifying the weighting process
• Integrating less information
• Examining fewer alternatives

Identify a cut-off for every attribute, and eliminate each alternative that has an attribute that is outside the cut-off

Compare a couple of alternatives for all attributes, keep the best one, and compare it to another alternative.

I have no knowledge of the implementation of this heuristic. Users often use tabbed browsing to perform this strategy: open a new tab, compare the two alternatives, close the tab with the poorer one.

Take the first satisfactory alternative

The Lexicographic procedure determines the most important attribute and then sorts the alternatives on that attribute.

all attributes have equal weight

Venere calculates an overall Guest Rating based on the mean rates of the different attributes (Cleanliness, Quietness, Spaciousness, Service, Surroundings)

The user A wants to go straight to the product she wants, but likes to know she is choosing among a great selection.
A good search engine would be the good tool for her.

The B user has a (clear) representation of the pertinent dimensions.

She needs to narrow the choice to the item that better fulfills her preferences.

The B user can be happy to use a faceted navigation and selection interface.

But see Peter Boersma, 2010 for its limits.

Help the C user to discover the pertinent dimensions

Whenever you can, categorize the items

The mere categorization effect: people are more satisfied by their choice when the alternatives are presented in categories, even if those are arbitrary and meaningless.

Allow the C user to avoid the decision process.

Amazon gives the users some suggestions: the customer can just pick one of this, without carrying the process of decision making.

• Facilitate both the "rational" and the heuristic decision strategies.
• Divide the process of decision making
• Design for the different users (A, B, C)
• Give the users some external aid (external cognition, suggestions)
• Categorize

Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not tango.
And tango is the best.

bussolon@gmail.com - @sweetdreamerit