Change Choice Effort

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Change Choice Effort

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INFLUENCE TACTIC

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Change Choice Effort

Alter the convenience of making a choice.

What is it:

Deciding things can be tiring. Our brains are always working hard, picking one thing over another, and this can get really overwhelming. Since our brains like to save energy, we often go for the most convenient and familiar option. What if we could use this natural tendency to our advantage? That's the idea behind changing the effort it takes to make a choice. We can tweak factors like accessibility, familiarity, ease, comfort, simplicity, user-friendliness, expedience, practicality, efficiency, and more. By making our preferred option more convenient, we're more likely to choose it, even if it requires a little bit more effort.

When to use it best:

How to use it:

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1. Identify the Goal

   Decide what outcome you want from the choice in your app, service, or project. Think about the behaviour you want to encourage.

   What do you want to achieve?

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2. Make it Easier

   Design your preferred option so it's straightforward and easy for users. Make sure it feels simple and familiar so that people can use it without thinking too hard.

   How can you make the option easier to use?

   What might stop people from picking this option?

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3. Use Repetition

   Keep showing your chosen option throughout your product or service. Use it in your branding, marketing, or anywhere your users will see it often. This helps it become more familiar.

   How can you include your preferred choice in different parts of the experience?

   Where could people benefit from seeing it more?

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4. Limit Choices

   Don’t overwhelm people with too many options. Offer just enough choices to keep them happy without freezing up, not knowing what to pick.

   How many options are you giving?

   Are all these choices necessary?

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5. Keep it Simple

   Explain your chosen option in a clear and straightforward way. Use helpful visuals like icons to make it even easier to understand.

   How can you make the information clearer?

   What visuals could help explain things better?

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6. Watch Out for Biases

   Be mindful of any biases that might come from making an option easy and familiar. Keep checking and tweaking your approach to avoid leading users to a bad decision.

   What biases could affect decision-making?

   How can you monitor and adjust to these biases?

What’s the science
behind it?

• Cognitive Ease

  Also known as Cognitive Fluency and Processing Fluency, refers to the level of mental effort required to process information or perform a task. It plays a significant role in decision-making and behavior, affecting our judgments, perceptions, and overall experience. High cognitive ease leads to System 1 thinking—fast, intuitive, and requiring little conscious effort. In contrast, low cognitive ease engages System 2 thinking—slow, deliberate, and demanding conscious effort.
  Changing the convenience of a decision can significantly impact behavior by altering cognitive ease. When information is presented in a clear, repetitive, and familiar manner, cognitive ease is enhanced, leading to a higher likelihood of acceptance and compliance. Factors like ease of pronunciation, font readability, and design of the interaction can all influence cognitive fluency. For example, an easy-to-read font may give the perception that a task is simpler, increasing the likelihood of adopting the behaviour.
  However, cognitive ease can also lead to cognitive biases and flawed decision-making. Familiarity and ease may cause individuals to accept false or inaccurate information, simply because it aligns with their existing beliefs or feels comfortable. When a stimulus feels fluent, people are more likely to rely on their initial gut reactions, whereas a dis-fluent stimulus may cause them to slow down and reconsider their initial response.
  Creating a positive and engaging environment can improve cognitive ease, making routine tasks more enjoyable and accessible.

• Mere Exposure Effect

  The mere exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon that describes how people tend to develop preferences for things simply because they are familiar with them. This effect occurs subconsciously and can significantly impact people's decision-making processes, especially when it comes to choosing between different options. The more familiar an option is, the more likely people are to prefer it, even if there are objectively better choices available.
  It's rooted in the concept of processing fluency (see Cognitive Ease above), which suggests that people tend to prefer things that are easy to process mentally. Familiar stimuli are easier to process because they require less cognitive effort, and as a result, people tend to evaluate them more positively.
  This effect has important implications for leaders, designers, change makers who can use this phenomenon to increase people's liking for a particular product, brand or feature by exposing them to it repeatedly. At the same time, this effect can also lead to suboptimal decision-making, where people choose a familiar option over a better one simply because they are more familiar with it.

• Hick's Law

  The law posits that the time it takes to make a decision rises logarithmically with the number of options available. This means that more choices lead to more time spent analysing and processing each option, causing cognitive overload and difficulty in arriving at a quick decision. The implications of this principle are essential for businesses as they must factor in the number of options they offer to customers. Providing too many choices can cause decision paralysis, resulting in lower sales and reduced customer satisfaction.
  Familiarity of options, decision complexity, and the cognitive abilities of the decision-maker are among the key factors that affect Hick's Law. Familiar options are easier to process, reducing the time taken to make a decision. On the other hand, unfamiliar options increase the complexity of the decision, leading to longer decision-making times. Additionally, individuals with higher cognitive abilities can process information more quickly, resulting in shorter decision-making times.

• Affect Heuristic

  A type of cognitive bias that refers to the tendency for individuals to rely on emotions instead of logic when evaluating something. When individuals evaluate a stimulus, they tend to rely on their emotional response, which can lead to biased decision-making. Mood state influences an individual's perception of the risks and benefits of a particular outcome. For instance, if a choice makes an individual feel happy or comfortable, they are likely to perceive it as having low risks and high benefits, even if that may not be the case. Conversely, if a choice makes an individual feel unhappy or uncomfortable, they may perceive it as having high risks and few benefits.
  Previous experiences, mindset, and personality all play a role in the impact of the affect heuristic. Individuals who have had positive experiences with a particular decision or situation are more likely to perceive it positively in the future

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