👨🏻‍✈️ Delegated Decisions:

We're more confident in choices made by others when we trust their expertise.

If you, as the product builder, are unsure of your user's needs (or desires), it can be tempting to simply delegate those decisions onto them.

For example, imagine that you're building a dashboard, and don't know what the "ideal" layout would be.

So, you just let the user have full customisation over how it looks, and which components go where.

It sounds okay in principle, but you:

  • Give the user more decisions to make (you've just delegated it to them).

  • Allowing the user to create rubbish dashboards (low efficiency, lower value).

Common ways of avoiding delegation

  • Default filters and settings — this is removing the initial decision of "how should I be viewing this content".

  • Default views and layouts — e.g., when you use Stripe, you don't create your dashboard from scratch. They've optimized one for you.

  • Features on by default — e.g., autocorrect is turned on by default, it'd be a waste of time to ask every user if they wanted it.

✅Churn

  • After signing up to your product, the user may be unable (or, not motivated enough) to create an efficient and productive tool.

  • Or, they may find the constant need to make major decisions tiring.

✅Feature usage

  • Key decisions may show/hide features that the user would have used, but didn't understand enough at the time that they made the decision.

✅Anxiety

  • They may churn even at the anxiety of having made the wrong decision.

✅Complexity & understanding

  • At every decision, does the user understand exactly the trade-off that they are making, and the consequences?

✅Perception of value
✅Productivity & efficiency

In these instances, it's almost always better to:

  • Speak to your users, and find out what they're trying to achieve.

  • Look at the data, and try to analyse what they're doing.

When to delegate decisions

Does this mean that you never let the user make any decisions? No, of course not.

But you need to be careful about delegating significant decisions, without considering the following:

  • Does the user really understand the impact of this decision? Could you give them more context?

  • Is there a possibility that the user is about to make a short-sighted decision, that in the end limits the value that they get from the product?