Clean the Sludge from Decision-Making Workflows (2024)

I’ve been recently thinking a lot about sludge — the muck that slowly accumulates in old pipes until the flow of material eventually stops. Poorly designed decision-making workflows feel a lot like sludge-filled pipes: clogged up, confusing, and overwhelming.

Quit Creating Nudges, Start Reducing Sludge

Cleaning up the sludge-filled decision-making workflows that torment users is the focus of our new report Helping Users Make Decisions: Reduce Choice Overload and Avoid Overwhelming Users.

The Nobel-Prize-winning behavioral economist Richard Thaler is famous for his nudge theory, which describes how to subtly guide individuals to make better decisions without limiting their freedom of choice, by incorporating small, noncoercive interventions that favor the most beneficial options.

When asked what the next frontier in choice architecture will be, Thaler shared the following insight about the limitations of nudges and what might, perhaps, be a better focus:

In other words, designers of choices (that is, choice architects) might try to nudge decision makers to make certain “good” choices. However, these efforts will be only marginally effective. Ultimately, users will do as they wish for several reasons, including:

• Already having decided what they’ll choose
• Simply repeating what they’ve chosen before
• Being too confused to fully understand options
• Not paying attention to all the information presented

No design can convince every user to take the actions an organization hopes they will. In fact, many attempts to manipulate user choices simply end up being deceptive.

Perhaps we should focus less on convincing users to do what we want them to (Subscribe! Purchase! Donate!) and more on helping them do what they already want to: efficiently make choices that they’ll be satisfied with. This is what “reducing sludge” means. Simple decision-making workflows are majorly profitable for organizations. They can lead to:

• Greater satisfaction: Some of the greatest challenges in any user journey are the decision-making moments — particularly when these decisions are complex or high-stakes.
• Increased retention: If making decisions is easy with your product, users are likely to return to you when they need to make the same decisions again.
• Reduced need for customer support: Users are less likely to reach out in confusion or frustration when they can make choices they’re satisfied with from the beginning.
• Fewer refunds and returns: A major reason customers ask for money back is because, at the time of purchase, they were unable to confidently make a decision they would be satisfied with.

What Kinds of “Decisions” Are We Talking About?

All of them. The number of roles digital products play in daily decision making is growing. I guarantee that, no matter what your industry, at least some of the interfaces and experiences you create present users with choices.

Here are a few examples from various industries:

• SaaS tools: Choosing a subscription plan or selecting preferences
• Ecommerce/retail: Selecting a product color, size, or level of quality, or choosing delivery options
• Finance: Selecting an account type or choosing investment options
• Healthcare: Selecting a treatment plan or selecting a healthcare provider
• Education: Choosing a course or a learning path
• Entertainment: Selecting content to watch or music to listen to
• Travel and Hospitality: Choosing a flight or selecting navigation routes

Necessary vs. Unnecessary Decisions

Some decisions are necessary and cannot be avoided; others are unnecessary and users can opt out of making a choice altogether. In either case, the user and the organization have something to gain from a good choice architecture.

How to Simplify Choice Architecture

It’s not easy. It begins with understanding the circ*mstances of the decision maker and the complexity of the decision. For example, try answering the following questions about a decision that your users face:

• How much prior experience do users have with making this type of decision?
• How impactful is this decision in their lives?
• How many options do users generally try to compare?
• How easily can users differentiate between the available options?

The better you understand factors like these, the better you can predict how difficult a decision will be and explain the reasons why. This knowledge will guide your use of various UX strategies and tools such as calculators and quizzes, comparison tables, or recommendations (all detailed in the report) to clean the sludge and help users easily make decisions they’ll be satisfied with.

Dive Deeper and Get Recommendations

If you’d like to dive into how users think about decision making and get some design-specific recommendations, check out our report called Helping Users Make Decisions: Reduce Choice Overload and Avoid Overwhelming Users. This report presents a framework for predicting how difficult a decision will be for users and for applying interface design patterns to simplify decision making.

The frameworks and recommendations in this report were developed from foundational academic literature on decision making and choice overload and from our own primary research on how users make decisions about digital products.

Reference

Thaler, R. 2021. What’s next for nudging and choice architecture? Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 163, (2021), 4-5. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.04.003. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597820303204.