In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice.
“People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.”
You would think that if you were given a list of choices, you would choose the one that is most important to you. In reality, humans usually choose the one that is easiest for them to understand and evaluate. Very often we do so because we don’t have the time to put in the research necessary to make an informed decision.
The more choices we have, the more difficult we find it to make any choice at all – and we often give up and choose nothing.
What does this mean for your website? Keep in mind that your visitor is busy and has hundreds of decisions to make every day. Make the decision to learn about what you offer easy. Make your copy straight to the point. Don’t waste your time on graphics, bells or whistles or anything that doesn’t drive your key points home.
