Andrea Gandino

Every now and then, I stumble upon a website in search for something.

Now, since the Internet is such a vast place to search something in, and since we usually give our browsing of the Internet a limited amount of time, if you find yourself in the condition of searching something, speed is many times a preferrable quality to have than the accuracy of the research. That’s the logic behind Google’s “I feel lucky” button.

When it comes to searching stuff, Google does a good job: it not only offers a whole lot of sources of content, but also provides the means for that content to be consumed by the user who queries the World.

This product that burst with simplicity and polish, is actually a very complex process that involves a huge number of resources, computing power, and a fairly decent amount of statistics math.

Google’s approach is what makes the difference: Google displays a limited set of results (pagination, that is), it sorts them by popularity, and generally helps people to find what they want in the shortest amount of time possibile, also thanks to its essential interface.

There are cases, though, clearly not Google-related, when the ability to have a very high amount of options all shown at the same time is regarded as preferrable.

Of course, ideally speaking, more choices mean a higher probability of finding what one wants. Also, having more choices is a situation that is perceived as a sign of intellectual liberty.

Given this, one could be lead to think that more choices are always preferrable.

Wrong.

Most of the times, when facing a situation where multiple options are available, the more alternatives we have, the less sure we are about what choice to make. For this very reason, given we actually pick one of those options, it’s very likely that we’ll feel an underlying sense of doubt and dissatisfaction.

It’s called the *paradox of choice* and it’s proved by a lot of studies concerning human behaviour. For more on the subject, Barry Schwartz’s works are mandatory.

But how a thing like that can affect our webby world? In other words, how can a Web page lead to that sense of indecision we’ve talked about a while ago?

It’s all about how you organize information, correctly evaluating the grade that measures how cluttered your page is, and most of all, what are the *specific* needs for the *specific* task you’re trying to offer an interface for.

Limit the entropy

There’s one thing that I like to call *cognitive entropy*, that is a way to measure the amount of cognitive efforts one must make in order to complete a certain task.

In physics, entropy represents the grade of disorder of a specific system, and can only increase as time progresses.

Just like the real entropy, cognitive entropy increases as the amount of information we have to deal with increases: in fact, many times the confusion of an interface is directly proportional to the number of options available.

Lots of choices, despite being regarded as the epitome of freedom, usually do nothing but get the cognitive entropy higher and higher: the end user undergoes several different mental phases to define a particular filtering condition he intends to apply.

The best thing we can do is try to *limit this process*.

So, when facing a situation when a lot of different choices are present, you can basically move in two directions.

One of them could be making choices so that they are not mutually exclusive: the act of researching will be more polished, to the detriment of the overall entropy of the process, not to mention the time factor.

Luckily we’ve got an alternative.

Divide et impera

British psychologist William Edmund Hick conjectured that it’s easier to choose twice from two equally sized lists of elements, than picking just once from a double sized list (Hick’s law).

So, a preferrable situation would be to limit the filters to a carefully *selected set of macro categories*.

Making use of what some guys would call *empathy*, you can look at the problem from a different perspective — in this case the user’s, and act accordingly, focusing on the filters that actually make sense in that specific context.

The joy of comparison

A good example of this last example is Threadless.

Threadless’ catalogue is huge, but instead of going with several filters at once, they offer just three very common conditions that can be freely combined: size, gender and price.

This three categories of search are the result of a very careful consideration. What could a visitor look for on a site that sells shirts? Let me try:

I want to buy my girlfriend (gender indication) a Small shirt (size) for around $10 (price). Let’s see…

Of course, one could always be willing to look for a specific color, for example, but that’s not as probable as the combination mentioned above. So that filter is perfectly tailored on the majority of the visitors’ needs.

You get a lot of results, but somehow you feel like you’ve restricted your options well enough, hence a general sense of satisfaction which lays the ground for the goal of the site, that is to sell its goods.

The secret for browsing happiness

Browsing the Web should be such a relaxing activity that should be perfectly natural and free from most of the cognitive load we face in our everyday lives.

As cognitive entropy increases, you need to do whatever you can to keep it low, organizing information accordingly, making large portions of content to be easily digestible by the users.

An effective way to do so, is to divide the content and the annexed burden of decisions in a reasonable amount of little parts, each one of them small enough to almost not overload the user’s brain: doing so, the end user will be less concerned about useless details, and more focused on what is his specific goal.

This is the primary condition for effectiveness, and, eventually, a *happy* browsing experience.