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Choice Archiecture refers to careful design of the environments in which people make choices

Thaler and Sunstein coined the term in their book Nudge. It’s idea can be applied to many domains – and User Expereince Design is one area.

Three key features of choice architecture are the default, giving feedback, and expecting error

Giving feedback

Google is developing choice architecture to remind Gmail users when they forget an attachment

If you mention the word attachment in the text of your email and you don’t include an attachment, Gmail would prompt you

Expecting error

The design of the Paris subway card, which allows users to insert it into an electronic turnstile in any of four ways to gain entrance to the subway.

Compare that to the ezLink card of Singapore MRT. You have to insert into the turnstile and there are four possible ways up, down, left, right and exactly one works.

This is the difference between good and bad design.

You might hear about the 3-clicks rule – letting visitors to access information “within 3 clicks” of their mouse or increasingly “3 taps”

An example from a univeristy homepage – tiny text links under the title are cluttering the Home Page fighting for visitors attention.

The reason I deducted could be well-intend. Putting up popular options to let visitors to access information “within 3 clicks”

Research* has long challenged the “3 clicks rule” – a very popular myth held by many people.

Here the secret – the number of necessary clicks affects neither user satisfaction, nor success rate.

What matters is the “scent of information” along the user path. Every click or interaction should bring user closer to their intend destination and give them the confidence that they are going down the right path. The whole idea is to create a flow.

For example, if I click the Students link, I expect to find out info about fees, admission, course programmes that are only for student etc. If I am in the fees section, I expect a link or information on Finanical Aid.

Another reason to ditch the 3-clicks rule – Choice Paralysis. Choice paralysis happens when the user is given too many options, they freeze and not sure what to do next.

Don’t you think this one without those walls of text links is less clutter on the eye and also serve the same function – direct visitors (whether students, alumni, faculty) to the information relevant to them?

* Jakob Nielsen’s usability tests found that “users’ ability to find products on an e-commerce site increased by 600 percent after the design was changed so that products were 4 clicks from the homepage instead of 3.” from the book Prioritizing Usability

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