Friction & The Paradox of Choice
You will have to excuse me....
Over the last week or two I've been in 'marketing' mode. And I'm not sure why, just everything I see in crypto and what not, has made me think of how so many projects get it right, while others fail so badly.
I guess it's just part of my DNA for life and I'll have to accept it :)
One of the lessons I learned years ago was what is called the 'paradox of choice'. Essentially it works like this, when someone has so many choices to buy / invest / develop, they end up going into their shells and choose...Nothing.
Take away a few choices, and limit them....People end up making a buying decision.
Pretty straight forward....I saw that with premium upgrades I used to sell on my websites. When I gave people the option of 3 levels of membership (free, pro and premium) I ended up with a lot of sales.
As soon as I added more than those 3 options, sales decreased.
So the lesson for me was, offer a few premium upgrade options, but not too many that would scare away potential customers. But then this brings me to the thoughts I have been having these past few weeks...
If the experience for your customer is awful, they won't even get to the place where you can sell them something. User experience is so critical to any online business or crypto platform, I believe it's THE most important.
Take for my example that I'm having currently with a project I invested in years ago called RealT. This is a slick little real estate investment platform that lets you buy tokenized 'slices' of real world real estate. In return, you get a slice of the rent you charge....
It's all fine and dandy, except for the fact it's based on....Ethereum.
Or more precisely Gnosis (xDai).
I don't need to tell you, anything to do with Ethereum is about as user friendly as smashing your toe with a hammer. It's down right awful. The friction caused by this token and it's awful user experience makes it painful to say the least.
And with that, I have been trying to 'exit' the project for years. But alas, I have no idea how to because the tokens are either on one chain or the other, and I pretty much give up out of frustration.
The friction causes me to not only lose interest, but REALLY desire to sell my tokens and side off into the sunset. And here's the thing, most users don't have a blog where they can voice their experiences.
Most just...Leave.
This is why I believe crypto, as a whole, has never taken off with real world use cases for payments etc...Because the friction caused by companies, banks, governments etc...Just make people not want to even bother.
With so many options out there, the paradox of choice rears it's head again and poof....They are back on the fiat and live happily ever after.
So my advice to all projects, businesses and entrepreneurs out there is...
Keep the friction and choices down to a minimum.
The worst thing you can do is give your customer multiple bad user experiences and then you don't need to worry about giving them options to pay you....They'll just leave and never return.
As for me....I'm still trying to sell off all my RealT tokens lol
(Note: The beneficiary rewards for this post are going to @leofinance and @leostrategy But I'm also sending 5% to the newest king of SURGE @monkmasters Well done sir!!!)
Posted Using INLEO
My experience thought me to leave hype aside when thinking of investing. I've seen too much hype in different projects with minimum impact when delivered. Thus, I find myself harder and harder convinced on the potential of one thing or the other. I believe now more in math than promises and what something can be as the equation is too complex nowadays.
So true. Feelings dont matter in this stuff lol
That RealT exit pain on Gnosis hits hard. The minute you need bridges, wrapped tokens and network switching, the only decision is to bail. A simple sell flow with one clear quote would probably keep way more people around than any promo. If you could change just one step there, what would you remove first to make it painless?
Press one button, sell.
Everything should connect to the wallets and it should be as seamless as possible.
Exactly. One click sell where the app bundles approvals, swaps, bridges, and gas in the wallet, the user just confirms. Hide chains, network switches, and weird token wrappers. Add a simple off ramp to fiat and fewer people will bail.
Thanks so much for the benefit! Friction is indeed an often apparently negligible force that can kill almost any process over the long haul. One of the great things about $LEO adding so much cross-chain interoperability.
Kill the friction!
I literally just give up when things get too complicated or there seems to be too many choices in front of me....I'm not the only dummy!!!
If not interested or mildly interested inn whatever it is, I just give up. If interested, it drives me batty until I figure it out.
I think making choices easier not only boosts customers' confidence in their decisions but also improves their overall experience.
Completely agree...And then they become raving fans!
Fortunately or unfortunately, people like simplicity.
Yup, indeed they do!
It's too bad that crypto hasn't moved more mainstream, but you can't blame anyone not doing so. People tend to move more on results or hype, and I just don't think people see the hype there for it right now.
Completely agree. This isn't on the individual. It's 100% on devs that make things too complicated
It is mind blowing sometimes if there are a lot of options to choose from and this makes simplicity very better
!BBH