Start with the easy choices to survive the hard ones

Sheena Iyengar, a behavioral scientist who studies how people choose, wanted to show how to get through a very complicated decision without losing people. Her example was a German carmaker that lets customers build a car from scratch, making 60 different decisions, from 56 exterior colors to four gearshift options.

She varied only the order. Half the customers started with decisions offering many options, like 56 colors, and ended with decisions offering few, like four gearshifts. The other half started with decisions offering few options and ended with decisions offering many. The information and the number of choices were the same. She measured engagement by how often people hit the default button for each decision, which she described as a sign they were getting overwhelmed and she was losing them.

The high to low group hit the default button over and over again. The low to high group hung in there and kept choosing.

Starting easy helped, she said, because it teaches how to choose. Choosing a gearshift tells nothing about preferences for interior decor, but it still gave them practice in deciding and built excitement about the larger product they were assembling, so they stayed motivated and engaged.

She offered this as one of four techniques for the problem of choice overload, which she calls condition for complexity. Her principle was to gradually increase the complexity. In a sequence like this car builder, that meant putting the four option decisions first and saving the 56 color decision for last.