Everyone likes choice, but presenting too many options can leave your clients feeling confused and overwhelmed. Worse yet, by providing your website visitors with too many options, they won’t know how to start, where to look or what to take away. Luckily, by developing a good strategy and content plan and using a little technology, you can offer your clients and prospects a user-friendly site, where they can easily find what they’re looking for – every time they visit.
Join One North Strategist, Josh Amer, as he shares tips and tricks to scale back on option overload and improve user experience. From site navigation and search to practice descriptions and publications, Josh provides examples of how law firms and other businesses are re-imagining how, how much and how often they deliver content on their websites.
To view a recording of the webinar, visit http://bit.ly/16HVmfr.
17. The Paradox of Choice
• Choice is great…
• Except when we have too many
options, then…
• We stress
• We get confused
• We overthink
• We’re never happy with our final
decision
19. The Grocery Store Experiment
• Sample table at a grocery store offering exotic jams
• Group A = 6 varieties
• Group B = 24 varieties
• More people were attracted to…
• However…
Group B
3% of participants made a purchase in group B
30% of participants made a purchase in group A
22. Hick’s Law…Less sciencey
• The more options we have, the longer it takes to process
all of the options
• On the web, this means we slow people down when we
give them too many options
25. Choice is Good for Many Reasons
• Without choice we feel trapped. Choice gives us a sense
of freedom.
• Choice acts as signal.
– Williams Sonoma - $279 Bread maker that wouldn’t sell… until
they released a $429 model
• Sometimes we just like options, but they have to
presented properly.
27. Strategies for Presenting Options
• We make 100s of decisions every day.
• Many of us have decision fatigue.
• Some smart companies have figured out ways to make
our decisions a little easier and they’ve done pretty well.
• Let’s look at some strategies…
37. Starbucks
• 87,000+ espresso drink
combinations
– ~30 menu options
• Fewer at the drive-
through
• Sometimes you can
assume your customers
will know you offer
something
43. Strategies for Making Decisions Easier
• Reduction. Doing a few things really well.
• Concealment. Options available, but not all are
presented.
• Progress. Breaking down decision into digestible pieces.
• Guidance. Providing paths decision making.
45. Types of Decisions on the Web
• Which site should I visit? (Last webinar)
• I’m here. Now where should I go?
• How should I get there?
• When I’m there, where should I focus?
• When I’m done, where should I go next?
46. Which Site Should I Visit?
• Before the site visit, a lot of decisions happens
– Do I go with a firm I know, or search for someone new?
– Do I search for the firm by name, lawyer name, something else?
– Do I go directly to the site?
– If I search, which result do I pick?
57. Caveats
• I am not a designer.
• None of these examples are taken directly from real law
firms.
• The solutions suggested work for my made up scenario,
but there’s no one size fits all solution. If there was, I
wouldn’t have a job.
• Even if your site does all of the things in my bad example,
we can still be friends.
61. Making It Better
• Hick’s law. By providing too many options, the navigation
slows the visitor down.
• Reduce / Focus. Fewer options will actually make it
easier to find the right option and make the visitor more
confident in their decision.
• Progressive decisions. Think like Chipotle. Combine
navigation into a few smaller decisions – don’t list every
possible combination.
65. Making It Better
• Paradox of choice. Most firms list all services because
they don’t want someone to think they can’t handle
something. But this can actually lead to confusion about
what you can actually do.
• Conceal. You don’t have to show everything at once, but
show what you think might be important to me.
• Conceal. If I already know something about the firm,
which most visitors will, I probably already know you have
the capability and can find it through search.
• Progressive decisions. Think like Chipotle. Break this
decision into smaller chunks.
67. How Should I Get There?
• Sometimes having alternate navigation paths is okay, but
sometimes this can feel like work for your visitors.
• Occasionally, sites offer a handful of options for reaching
the same goal – or a single tool that offers many different
options.
80. Everyone’s Doing It
• The average AM Law 100 website has 9 ways to search
for a person!
• Some of these tools include more than 200 options in a
single drop-down (particularly schools)
• Some usability experts recommend not using a drop-
down for lists that include any more than 15 options
81. More Bad News
• We live in a multi-device world. Drop-down lists with large
numbers of options are often difficult to use, and
sometimes completely unusable, on mobile devices.
• Including unnecessary options is directly counter to the
mobile experience we generally want – fast load times
and easy interactions.
82. Making It Better
• Option overload. Too many options to easily decide
which option is the correct option.
• Hick’s law. Search feels clunky and unusable because it
takes too long to use the filters.
• Filtering the unseen. All of the drop-downs are really
filters. Showing them before there’s anything to filter
means we are almost always showing options that are
completely irrelevant.
85. The Where to Look Decision
• Once you find some content, you are often presented
with too many distractions. Focus your user on the
content you want them to see. Everything else will
distract from your goals.
95. Making It Better
• Conceal. In this scenario, visitors are distracted and often
either ignore the content you want them to see, or
completely skip over the related / ancillary content.
– Conceal the related content until the main content has been
digested.
98. Where Should I Go Next?
• After a visitor reaches the end of a story, bio or other
page, they are often left to their own devices to
determine where to go next.
• Some sites handle this better than others by providing
clear guidance.
106. Making It Better
• Guidance. This design has a number of things that I could
do next, but no clear guidance as to which is the next
most logical step. Think like Ikea and adopt an “Exit
through the gift shop” mentality for all of your content.
111. Business Decisions are Even Harder
• No one ever got fired for going to lunch at Raising Cane’s
• The greater the impact of the decision, the greater the
need for research and evaluation
• We pay more attention to the differences in details
amongst our options
• These decisions are just hard.
113. Make Your Website the Easiest Part
• One North’s 2012 General Counsel Survey reveals that
many GCs review a firm’s website one or two times per
month during the credentialing process (decision making)
• The most important features of a website for respondents
of the survey were clear and usable navigation (34%) and
relevant and valuable content (31%)
• Make your website the easiest part of the decision
process
• Set the standard for ease of working with your firm
114. Key Takeaways
• Too many options slow down the decision process, which
on the web means your site feels difficult to use.
• To make your site feel faster and more user focused,
provide the right options at the right time in the right
place to the right person.
• Remember:
– Reduction.
– Concealment.
– Progress.
– Guidance.
115. Where to Go Next
• Read the Paradox of Choice
• Review your website looking for option overload
• Watch our last webinar: Transparency in SEO
• Read the One North blog
– Keeping Up with ‘The Times’ – Readability’s Future on the Web
– Spring Cleaning: 6 Ways to Clean Up Your Site