Maybe you have heard the term “Paradox of choice”, or maybe you are familiar with it already. It comes from the American psychologist Barry Schwartz and his book “The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less”. In this book he explains how our satisfaction depends on the success or failure of our goals. The concept behind it is particularly interesting for product configurator, since we are dealing with a lot of customization options. The idea can be summarized as follows: more choices or options make it more difficult for people to make a decision. Though this theory can be applied in many areas of our lives, it is particularly relevant in a business context. The greater the number of options, the grater the risk customers reach a point where they can’t make a decision anymore. They become too overwhelmed to make a choice. And to cope with this, they make no decision at all! What can we learn from experiments? A lot of experiments have been done on the concept of “Paradox of choice”. One of the most important was conducted in a gourmet supermarket in California. The research group set up a sampling table with jam jars. One time with 6, and the other time 24 different flavors. Customers of the supermarket who had tasted samples were then given a voucher to buy jam at a lower price. On average, 2 flavors were tested in both scenarios. So nothing special here. But now comes the interesting part. For the large range of flavors, about 60% stopped to try one. And for the smaller one just 40%. However, 30% of the testers of the small selection bought a jar of jam afterwards, while only a mere 3% bought one of the large selection. This shows us that a balance must be found: too many options is not good, but too few neither. That raises the question: how much choice is enough?
So how much choice is enough? Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to this question. The answer has to be found by trail and error. The best way is to just publish your initial configurator and start measuring results. Based on the data, you can then start improving your configurator so that it meets your customers’ needs. This does not happen overnight, but eventually your product configurator will become a real sales booster for sure! It also depends on your target group. Do your users want 30 shades of each color? Great, go for it! But if the answer is no, maybe try to find out what colors are being ordered the most. But if you want to offer all 30 options anyway, make sure you are using some kind of recommendation system to highlight the 5 most popular colors, for example. Or make suggestions based on the current configuration. This way, your customers can still choose from a wide range of options, but will be guided out of uncertainty with curated preselections. When you start seeing clear similarities in ordered products, you kind of know what most of your customers want. If you want to take it to the next level, you can even make that selected the default product option. Then it becomes just one click away for your customers to order the product. That also prevents the paradox of choice, because they are already happy with the result right at the start! But you have to collect loads of data for this to actually work out well. Can I minimize the risk? Yes you can minimize the risk directly in your product configurator. You can integrate an intelligent recommendation system that guides customers through the configuration process. After all, most decisions are made with a little help of recommendations. Another risk you can minimize is adding unnecessary functions to your product configurator, which makes the configurator only a little more complex but does not help with the selling process. As soon as a feature starts confusing your customers, or when you see a decline in sales after implementation, that usually is a sign that you can better revert it that leave it in there. Before implementing new features, you should always ask what benefits they will bring to your users and validate the usefulness. Summary No matter how many options you are going to implement in your product configurator, always think about how to configurator can support your users in their decision making process! If a feature or option is not going to help with that, it is better to leave it out. Sometimes, less is more indeed. Key takeaways: Potential customers appreciate a large range of products and a lot of choice Too much choice and options can be confusing and paralyzing Reduce the risks that prevent customers from making decisions Help your customers find their perfect configuration Evaluate the usefulness of features from the user’s point of view Compare performance with different numbers of variations