Pat’s Point of View

On the weekend I found myself in a furniture store (as you do…once you’re married) and this particular store sells only sofas, which you can pretty much configure endlessly to match what you want. So there’s a huge number of options for width, height, length, arm size, arm style, cushion style, fabrics and feet. Fabulous flexibility.

This is good, right? Everybody wants options. Well what I’ve noticed (I’ve been in there more than a few times now) is that this confuses the hell out of customers. People spend literally hours in the store trying to play around with the configuration of their new sofa, locked in a verbal wrestle with the sales assistants. They sometimes comment that the poor girls working there get confused themselves and often don’t quote the same price twice. I’m not surprised, there’s too much choice!

Infinite flexibility leads to infinite options and a greatly reduced chance of the customer being able to make a decision–I mean this is the future of your home we’re talking about, a topic not to be taken lightly :)

Contrast this with your average furniture retailer. You walk in, they have this, this and this ‘model’ of sofa. Perhaps you can change the colour but that’s usually about it. You either like what they’ve got or you don’t. Sounds rather restrictive, but people buy stuff in this way day in and day out. They have a reduced set of choices, but are easily able to come to terms with those choices and can make a decision. Factor into this the weeks, if not months, of furniture shopping which husbands…err, I mean people, typically go through and the decision becomes even easier. Ahh, the power of apathy.

So I think this is yet another case of a business model based on what sounds like what people want, but the reality is that it’s diametrically opposed to what they really want once they’re in the shop. Possibly this would work better if it was done through a website that customers could interrogate with all conceivable combinations of options and get a price, as opposed to a human salesperson. Yet it’s still altogether too much choice, especially when you can go next door for the wham-bam-thank-you-maam shopping experience.

Counter-thought: perhaps this is only the case when shopping to a budget (which I always seem to be). If you had unlimited money to spend, then being able to just pick exactly the bits you wanted might work well. Trying to handle the complexity of the choices available and keep the finished sofa under a certain dollar figure, that’s hard. It means that rather than ‘following your heart’ and simply choose what you want, you end up going around in circles in an effort to find a balance between options and price.

Or maybe this whole problem exists because I’m a man; women probably have some genetic ability to handle infinite choice, like multi-tasking.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 10:37 am and is filed under Design research, Ramblings, Usability. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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About the author

Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.