More options can reduce satisfaction and completion, but the effect is much less reliable than the popular version suggests.
I'm designing
An Ecommerce Experience
Browsing, comparing and buying, where trust and honesty are load-bearing.
What this surface turns on
- How a large catalogue is made navigable.
- What evidence a buyer needs before committing.
- When the total cost becomes visible.
- Whether an account is required, and at what point.
Where these usually go wrong
- Fees revealed only at the final step.
- Filters that produce zero results with no way to recover.
- Negative reviews hidden, which makes the positive ones read as filtered.
- Fabricated scarcity counters and reference prices, both of which are enforceable.
- Product imagery with no sense of scale.
Why these
Buying is a sequence of small trust decisions ending in a payment. The entries here cover finding and comparing products, the honesty of the total, and the checkout mechanics that abandonment research keeps pointing at.
Why it works the way it does
The reasoning layer. Read these when a decision needs justifying, or when something is failing and you cannot say why.
The first number a person sees shapes every judgement that follows, even when it is obviously arbitrary.
People look to others' behaviour when deciding, especially under uncertainty.
People judge an experience by its most intense moment and its ending, not by the average of the whole thing.
Losing something feels worse than gaining the same thing feels good, which shapes how people react to change.
Effort increases as a visible goal gets nearer, and artificial early progress accelerates the whole journey.
The craft decisions
The visual and structural foundations that carry most of the weight on this surface.
Images either carry information or they do not, and the ones that do not are costing you load time.
The order in which elements are noticed, controlled by size, weight, colour, position and space.
Using size, weight, colour and space to make the structure of text visible before it is read.
Colours assigned a fixed meaning, which only works if the assignment is consistent and never the only signal.
A shared structure that makes alignment automatic and layout decisions repeatable.
Empty space is a design element that groups, emphasises and sets pace, not leftover area.
Patterns to reach for
Solutions people already recognise, with the conditions under which each one earns its place.
Narrowing a large set by attributes, which is what makes large catalogues navigable at all.
Reordering a set, where the default order is the decision that matters most.
Putting options side by side so differences can be seen rather than remembered.
The escape hatch from navigation, and often the primary path for users who know what they want.
User-contributed evaluations, which build trust only when the negative ones are visible too.
The screen before there is anything to show, which is a teaching opportunity rather than a gap.
Components you will specify
Each entry covers the states, behaviour and accessibility contract you need to define.
A container that groups content about one object, and the most over-applied component in modern UI.
Rotating content in one space, which performs poorly for anything the user needs to see.
A small marker of status, category or count, which must not look like something you can press.
Splitting results into pages, which preserves position and keeps the footer reachable.
Choosing one option from a known set, which is the wrong control below about five options.
Accessibility requirements
Not a separate pass. These are the requirements this surface raises, mapped to the decisions that produce them.
The text equivalent of an image, which depends on the image's purpose in that specific context.
Colour may reinforce meaning but must never be the only thing carrying it.
Interactive targets need to be large enough and spaced enough to hit reliably.
Everything must be operable with a keyboard alone, which is the single most load-bearing accessibility requirement.
Content must work at 400 percent zoom without horizontal scrolling, which is the same as working at 320 pixels wide.
Language and content
The words do more work here than most teams budget for.
The small pieces of text that do most of the work: labels, hints, empty states, errors and confirmations.
Say what happened, why if you know, and what to do next, in that order and in plain language.
Designing so the product can be adapted to other languages and regions without being rebuilt.
How to find out
Research methods suited to the questions this surface raises.
Measuring progression through a sequence, where the largest drop is rarely the biggest opportunity.
Watching people attempt real tasks, which is the most direct evidence available about whether a design works.
Comparing variants with real traffic, which tells you what happened without telling you why.
Measuring what people do at scale, which tells you where problems are and never why they exist.
Check your work
Interactive checklists, with progress saved in your browser.
Product pages, cart and checkout, covering the decisions that determine whether people buy.
Whether the design serves the user's interest, including where that now overlaps with legal obligation.
Touch targets, reach, input, performance and the assumptions that only fail on a phone.
Documents you might need
Fillable templates, prefilled so they are usable rather than empty.
The stages a person moves through, with what they do, think and feel, and where the experience breaks.
The problem, the constraints and the success measures, agreed before design starts.
Decisions other teams made
Worked cases, including the options that were rejected and why.
A retailer required registration before purchase to build its customer database, and lost the sales it was trying to capture data about.
A large share of searches returned nothing, and the fix was vocabulary rather than the search engine.
Designing something else?
Neighbouring territory. Each surface reuses much of the same material, arranged around the decisions that surface turns on.