How you doing everybody? You having a good night? Okay, so I've been working with teleconference
companies for the last few years to try and improve their online sales. And the biggest
challenge I've had all this time is just how much choice these guys offer. So when I
initially started working with them, I said, guys, there's too much choice here. There's
just too many products. You got to read this book by Barry Schwartz, the paradox of choice.
I'm sure loads of you are familiar with it. But for those who aren't, let me just give
you a high level. What Barry says is that if you ask anyone if choice is a good thing,
you invariably get a positive response. Choice is all these ideas of freedom, of control,
and autonomy wrapped up in them. And everybody wants that. But the reality of choice is actually
something different. We're bombarded with it constantly. If I go down to my local Tesco
store and I try and buy some butter, there's probably 50 or 60 different types of butter
there. And with that much choice, I can't choose. I can't make a decision. With that
much choice, people actually walk away and they don't buy. And so this is the paradox
of the book. People say they want choice. They say choice is great. And yet, in reality,
their behaviour says something else. And the research proves it too. The less choice you
offer, the more you sell. And this just feels like such a relevant learning for telephone
companies. This is a picture I took in the UK of a store that was full of phones. It
was so full of phones, there were different ones for fashionistas versus stylatics. What's
the difference between them? So you get the idea. There's just too much choice there.
So in response to that, we built a page like this. From the home page, click on phones.
You see the four most popular phones with big buy now buttons. We're reducing choice
and feeling smug. The sales are going to come in. And yet, in reality, this page utterly
fails. All people care about in this page is this all phones button down at the bottom.
They're going to buy one of these phones later because they are the four most popular phones.
But at this point, they won't make that decision. And so we spend ages trying to figure out why
this page failed. And the reasons it's failed is fundamentally due to trust. No one actually
trusts the company to show them the four most popular phones. So that page back there just
makes them feel limited and controlled. And so while people might struggle with too much
choice, if they feel that choice is being artificially controlled, they're not interested.
And this trust thing actually isn't just for telecom companies. It's pretty much for all
big business. I tried to think of a big Irish company when I was coming here that after I
would say, I trust you so much, you make the decision for me. And I couldn't think of any.
Now, I'm going to do a little example from small business this time. This guy is Colin
Harmon. He is two-time Irish Bristol champion, two-time fourth in the world Bristol championships,
and owner of three coffee shops. Sure you all go there. But when you go into Collins shop,
what you see actually is quite a limited menu. You only get three options here. And yet this
time, the limitation in choice doesn't feel bad. It actually feels like a good thing.
This menu feels curated, particularly for you. And so it's like brings up all these
things because of the trust that you have in Collins reputation, you're happy to go
with that. And so this brings up the ideas of trust and control and the relationship
between them. We've seen from the examples that when you have low trust, trying to reduce
choice just doesn't work. And that's the position that a lot of our businesses are in. A lot
of big businesses just can't reduce trust. They can't reduce choice because they've
low trust. Trying to increase trust would be such a massive effort. So what do they
do? They seed choice to the customer, allow them the control. And what you get here is
this real, real, real, real sort of catch-22. We know that more choice reduces sales. But
for big business, a lot of time, that's all they can do. And for us as designers, we
got to live with it. There's a lot of choice there. We got to deal with it. Now, in the
real world, for big companies like this, you walk into one of their stores and you see
a human being. They can understand what you're asking for. They can reduce to a choice to
a level where you can actually make a decision. But for online, we don't have that human contact.
So here's three real quick learnings for what we found for lots of choice. One, get people
to the product listing page. That's where they feel comfortable, that's where they'll
buy from. Two, the filtering this page is really important. That's the way they're going
to narrow the choice to make a decision. And three, try and be as open and honest as your
designs as possible. This is a design that we did all about recommending products. But
the beauty of it is that it sits in the product listing page. So when you get a recommendation,
you can compare it against all the others. But to be honest, I think online's got a hell
of a lot of work to do. If online was a sales guy, I think he looked like one of these dudes
here. Online's got to do way more at helping the customer to manage this level of trust.
And choice isn't going anywhere. We got to live with it. So this is the challenge. And
the challenge I put to all designers here. We got to find better ways to manage this
level of trust. To find designs that work well in regards to being more elegant, more
clever, and more trustworthy. Thank you very much, everybody.
