More options can reduce satisfaction and completion, but the effect is much less reliable than the popular version suggests.
PSY·002
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.
BIAS·001
People judge an experience by its most intense moment and its ending, not by the average of the whole thing.
LAW·007
Losing something feels worse than gaining the same thing feels good, which shapes how people react to change.
BIAS·002
Effort increases as a visible goal gets nearer, and artificial early progress accelerates the whole journey.
LAW·014
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.
FND·051
The order in which elements are noticed, controlled by size, weight, colour, position and space.
FND·001
Using size, weight, colour and space to make the structure of text visible before it is read.
FND·032
Colours assigned a fixed meaning, which only works if the assignment is consistent and never the only signal.
FND·023
Empty space is a design element that groups, emphasises and sets pace, not leftover area.
FND·015
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.
PAT·004
The escape hatch from navigation, and often the primary path for users who know what they want.
PAT·002
User-contributed evaluations, which build trust only when the negative ones are visible too.
PAT·020
The screen before there is anything to show, which is a teaching opportunity rather than a gap.
PAT·010
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.
CMP·022
Rotating content in one space, which performs poorly for anything the user needs to see.
CMP·027
A small marker of status, category or count, which must not look like something you can press.
CMP·023
Splitting results into pages, which preserves position and keeps the footer reachable.
CMP·021
Choosing one option from a known set, which is the wrong control below about five options.
CMP·004
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.
A11Y·007
Everything must be operable with a keyboard alone, which is the single most load-bearing accessibility requirement.
A11Y·002
Content must work at 400 percent zoom without horizontal scrolling, which is the same as working at 320 pixels wide.
A11Y·013
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.
WRT·001
Say what happened, why if you know, and what to do next, in that order and in plain language.
WRT·002
Designing so the product can be adapted to other languages and regions without being rebuilt.
WRT·006
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.
RES·011
Watching people attempt real tasks, which is the most direct evidence available about whether a design works.
RES·001
Comparing variants with real traffic, which tells you what happened without telling you why.
RES·009
Measuring what people do at scale, which tells you where problems are and never why they exist.
RES·010
Check your work
Interactive checklists, with progress saved in your browser.
Product pages, cart and checkout, covering the decisions that determine whether people buy.
CHK·006
Whether the design serves the user's interest, including where that now overlaps with legal obligation.
CHK·010
Touch targets, reach, input, performance and the assumptions that only fail on a phone.
CHK·003
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.
TPL·004
The problem, the constraints and the success measures, agreed before design starts.
TPL·010
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.
CASE·001
A large share of searches returned nothing, and the fix was vocabulary rather than the search engine.
CASE·006
Designing something else?
Neighbouring territory. Each surface reuses much of the same material, arranged around the decisions that surface turns on.