At what point does “more choice” become bad design? I’ve…
0 reactions
At what point does “more choice” become bad design?
I’ve been noticing this pattern across a lot of products lately, especially in content platforms, where having more options doesn’t necessarily make the experience better.
In theory, more choice should be a good thing. More variety, more personalization, more chances to find something you like. But in practice, it often turns into this weird kind of friction where the user spends more time deciding than actually doing the thing they came for.
I ran into this pretty hard with movies. Endless rows, recommendations, categories, but somehow nothing feels like the right choice in the moment. It made me wonder if the issue isn’t discovery, but decision fatigue.
Out of curiosity, I tried experimenting with the opposite approach. Instead of maximizing options, I reduced everything down to a small, curated set and added a couple of simple constraints like “mood” and “time available”, just to see if limiting choice would make the experience feel lighter.
It wasn’t anything serious, more of a rough experiment than a polished design, but it felt surprisingly easier to actually make a decision.
Now I’m wondering how designers here think about this tradeoff. Is the goal to help users explore as much as possible, or to help them decide faster?
At what point does adding more options stop being helpful and start becoming bad design?
#art
I’ve been noticing this pattern across a lot of products lately, especially in content platforms, where having more options doesn’t necessarily make the experience better.
In theory, more choice should be a good thing. More variety, more personalization, more chances to find something you like. But in practice, it often turns into this weird kind of friction where the user spends more time deciding than actually doing the thing they came for.
I ran into this pretty hard with movies. Endless rows, recommendations, categories, but somehow nothing feels like the right choice in the moment. It made me wonder if the issue isn’t discovery, but decision fatigue.
Out of curiosity, I tried experimenting with the opposite approach. Instead of maximizing options, I reduced everything down to a small, curated set and added a couple of simple constraints like “mood” and “time available”, just to see if limiting choice would make the experience feel lighter.
It wasn’t anything serious, more of a rough experiment than a polished design, but it felt surprisingly easier to actually make a decision.
Now I’m wondering how designers here think about this tradeoff. Is the goal to help users explore as much as possible, or to help them decide faster?
At what point does adding more options stop being helpful and start becoming bad design?
#art
| 2,000 mlx | |
| 3 | |
| 0 |