We Leverage Hick’s Law when Designing Real Websites to Encourage Your Visitors to Engage
Named for British Psychologist William Edmund Hick, this law states that the more choices a consumer has, the longer it will take them to make a decision.
In a study on decision making in supermarkets, Hick set up two sample displays of jam. One had 24 flavors, and the other had only six flavors of jam.
The results showed that 60% of people stopped and sampled jam from the table with 24 flavors. However, only 6% ended up purchasing a jar of jam.
Meanwhile, only 40% of people stopped to sample jam from the table with six flavors, but an astonishing 30% ended up purchasing jam.
Applying Hick’s Law to Your Site Design
The takeaway here should be obvious. By narrowing the number of choices your visitors have, you can dramatically increase your conversion rate.
In order to do this effectively, we need to take the time to figure out exactly what it is you want your visitors to do on each page of your site. For a landing page this might be obvious. You want them to start a home search, get a home valuation, or fill out a form and give you their contact info.
For other pages on your site, the answer might not be so obvious. For example, what is the main thing you want visitors to do on your homepage? Do you want them to start searching for property, or read the latest from your blog? Check out your brand new listings? Schedule a listing appointment?
In order to get you thinking the reasoning behind our methodology, I’ll run through a couple of sites for some top producing Realtors.
Here is the main page for Los Angeles luxury brokers Williams & Williams:
This is an extreme example from a team that has dozens of beautiful listings in Beverly Hills… Their goal is to encourage people to look at their listings first.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the below is a real estate website that still uses Hick’s Law. Check out the homepage layout:
The goal here is to get the visitor using the home search, using testimonials to create some confidence in the fact this is a real site. This site is geared towards generating buyer leads, this layout makes perfect sense.
For landing pages or home value sites, Hick’s Law is even clearer. In most cases you don’t even have the option to do anything besides enter your address and contact info.
To learn more about applying Hick’s Law to website design, check out Usabilla’s excellent write up here.
