The 10 Principles of Choice Architecture

Note: This post is primarily made for people with an intermediate to advanced level understanding of marketing, design, or customer experience. The people who will get the most value from this will be professionals working in marketing, web design, UI design, or any other field where designing choices and/or guiding decisions is an important part of the job. This also includes roles that involve customer experience, policy-making, or any sort of product/service delivery.

Intro: The Problem

Every day, we're bombarded with choices. From the moment we wake up to when we turn off the lights to sleep, our lives are a series of decisions. I've always been interested in how we make those decisions. How do we decide? Why do we decide? This is one of many reasons why I decided to study neuroscience and psychology.

In that study, I learned more than I could have ever imagined about human behavior. Those learnings gave me a unique knowledge set I was able to apply to my life, business, and serving my clients.

One problem that every business must solve is how to properly "architect" choices for their customers. Everything a business offers a customer is a "choice" the customer decides on. Smart businesses think deeply about how to set up those choices in order to create maximum value for the customer and therefore value for the business.

The Solution: Choice Architecture

For the past several months, I've specifically been studying good choice architecture. I recently completed Academy's program on "Behavioral Economics and Psychology in Marketing", which is taught by acclaimed marketing experts at Ogily like Rory Sutherland and Dan Ariely of Duke University. In addition to that program, I've read several good books on the topic as well, which I'll link to in a resources section at the end of this post.

In these many months of studying, I absorbed a ton of information about how to architect choices well for maximum consumer and business value. Thankfully, I took copious notes. However, there's little point in just having information for the sake of information. Information and "theory" is one thing. Insights, applications, and putting all that information into practice is another.

Therefore, I used what I learned in a course I took on Memory and Cognition at OSU to organize the information I learned into a simple system that I could both use and easily remember. I synthesized all of the information into a simple acronym, with each letter of the acronym representing a principle of choice architecture.

I intend to use these principles in several contexts:

• In analyses of behavior in the real world

• In the design of effective user interfaces for my business and my clients' businesses

• To give myself a model I can use to think about my own behavior and what may be influencing me in any context.

I synthesized the application of choice architecture into the following ten main principles.

Quick Notes

• When I write "choice set", I mean a "set of choices". This could be any set of choices you provide a customer. For example, pricing options, sizes, checkout flows, service delivery options, your website navigation setup, and any other thing where a user/customer is making a choice on what to do.

• It's a model. Remember Box's aphorism, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." Virtually no model will include every single contingency, exception, and principle. Models are tools, not absolute truths. Models are frameworks to help us understand and organize information, not exhaustive maps that cover every single possible scenario. Treat it as a tool for solving problems.

The Application: The EASI CHOICE Framework