The messy middle and how to help

My phone 📲 buying checklist isn’t like everyone’s – but it reveals patterns about the ‘messy middle’ of consumer decision-making.

Everyone has different criteria for buying a phone, mine are weird:
– I want an Android phone
– It can’t be Huawei (because I use the Google Suite) and I don’t like Samsung
– I don’t want it to be too expensive
– I think 𝐚𝐥𝐥 phones these days are good enough, so I don’t really care which one I get.

Other people’s criteria might be processing speed, camera, how much memory it’s got, price, features, packages etc, but with a complicated decision many people have different ideas.
It depends how important the purchase is to you. Iain MacDonald commented something I thought was insightful about purchasing behaviour. Is your purchase a: “𝖢𝗈𝗆𝗆𝗈𝖽𝗂𝗍𝗒 𝗉𝗋𝗈𝖽𝗎𝖼𝗍 𝗈𝗋 𝗁𝗂𝗀𝗁𝗅𝗒 𝗉𝖾𝗋𝗌𝗈𝗇𝖺𝗅, 𝗅𝗈𝗇𝗀-𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗆 𝗂𝗇𝗏𝖾𝗌𝗍𝗆𝖾𝗇𝗍?” This makes a big difference in how you approach your buying decision.

Google also has new research out about what they call the “messy middle” (link in the comments). Humans use “information foraging” to find bits of information relevant to their purchase and move on to other information sources depending on how useful their foraging is. They noted customers getting more sophisticated over time with more specificity in their searches to try and battle through the myriad of choices.

How I approach helping visitors through this is as follows; I aim to understand people’s shopping criteria. There are many ways to do this:
– see which filters are used most on heatmaps
– ask people in surveys how they shop
– undertake usability testing
– understand people’s jobs to be done and how they approach it
Once we have this we can add, prioritise or change the page and help people find what they’re looking for. We want to try to make the experience much more catered and much more helpful (I’m not talking about personalisation here, but that can definitely help).
If you can allow people to easier find their most appropriate product then you’ll increase conversion rates and revenue over time.