The amount of time a person is willing to spend on a site varies widely depending on their circumstances, the problem that they’re trying to solve, and their individual characteristics. Some people are naturally inclined to pore over every last word, and even the least detail-oriented person tends to spend more time reading when they are especially passionate about something or if it involves significant consequences.
Those circumstances exist, but a far more frequent scenario is for a user to arrive at a painstakingly designed page — which a team of designers may have spent weeks fine-tuning to fit in valuable, meaningful content — and spare it only a cursory glance before clicking through to the next page. (The average page visit lasts less than a minute—but many are 10 seconds or less.)
Satisficing
When faced with a decision, users can either take the time to find the best answer, or they can settle for a ‘good-enough’ answer and get on with their lives. Psychologists call this latter strategy satisficing, a combination of the terms “satisfy” and “suffice.”
Satisficing occurs when someone settles for something that they know may not be the best possible choice but meets their essential needs.
Because of the sheer volume of information and options available, it’s often impossible for people to evaluate and compare every possible choice. You could spend the rest of your life shopping for the perfect vacation rental, but then you would never actually get to go on our vacation.
Certainly, high-stakes situations can inspire people to investigate more thoroughly, but most of our actions on the web aren’t life-changing. In these everyday cases, time constraints and low risks mean that finding the perfect answer isn’t important enough to justify spending a lot of research time. This is when satisficing usually kicks in: people take just enough time to identify at least one reasonable option, select it, and move on.
Unless your site is about life-and-death decisions, many — if not most — of your users are going to be satisficing, and understanding this mindset is critical to helping them be successful.
In fact, satisficing is so ubiquitous that it underlies many fundamental usability principles for writing on the web, as well as for allowing users flexibility and control.
A Satisficing User Experience
If there were no cost to conducting infinite research, users would probably aim for perfection every time. But, of course, every user interface imposes an interaction cost on every step the user takes. Users subconsciously have to trade off between these costs and the added benefit of locating an even better answer by staying on the site longer. That’s why they satisfice.
If you do want users to engage more deeply with your site, there are two strategies:
- Lower interaction cost: Make each step easier, and users will walk further. Most traditional usability guidelines aim at this strategy.
- Higher benefits: Ensure that users can quickly get some pretty good information. Recognize that users will be satisficing and boost their outcome.
Of course, you should pursue both strategies simultaneously. Since we’ve written so much about the first approach already, this article focuses providing higher benefits for satisficers.
Example 1: Writing for Satisficers
We know from eyetracking research that most people don’t take the time to read every word on a web page. The strategies that people use to scan text and skim headings are examples of satisficing: trying to get “just enough” — an understanding of what the author is saying — while spending the minimum amount of time.
Classic principles of good writing, including descriptive titles and inverted-pyramid structures, help satisficers extract the meaning from text as quickly as possible. It’s great to provide rich, detailed information, but succinct summaries are essential for attracting satisficers. If it requires a lot of effort (i.e., reading to the end of a full paragraph) to understand a site’s offerings, many of its visitors will never even realize what’s available.
Example 2: Sorting Helps Satisficers Quickly Identify Good-Enough Options
Sorting takes a list of items and reorders it according to one or more criteria. Each criterion needs to be ordinal, meaning that its values can be ordered from smaller to larger (or vice versa). Giving users the option to sort their choices lets them control the content presentation and adjust it to best meet their needs.
Sorting helps satisficers because whatever they are looking for — the most popular, the cheapest, the most highly rated, or the most recent — will be shown right on top. No scrolling or paging through dozens or hundreds of similar items, just immediate access to one that will be perfectly adequate to meet their user needs.
Of course, content should be sorted by default into the order that most users want, but quite often, there are other sorting dimensions that are just as helpful to certain users. For example, the Adobe Stock website, where customers can purchase stock photos, by default presents images in order of relevance to the users’ search query. Relevance is one of the most common sorting criteria, and people are accustomed to relevance ranking due to their experience with web search engines like Google.
But Adobe Stock also offers visitors the option to sort images by chronology and by popularity.
- Chronological sorting will benefit frequent visitors to the site, who may already be familiar with older images and may want to find out whether anything new has been added.
- Popularity sorting appeals to customers who trust the wisdom of the crowd — the images that other users found most compelling.
The default relevance sorting probably helps the largest number of people, those who are just looking for a decent picture that matches their query. Offering multiple sorting options is a simple way to help even more people quickly find a good-enough option.
Conclusion
Every web page should be evaluated with satisficing in mind. Can someone who’s never seen the page before figure out what it’s about at a glance? Is the most essential information prioritized in an obvious location?
Once you’ve worked on a design and are familiar with it, it’s difficult to answer these questions objectively. Testing your site with representative users is the best way to make sure that they get what they need.
