Analysis Paralysis
The state of overthinking a decision to the point that no action is taken, often due to too many options or too much information.
Too many options hurts users’ decision-making ability
How they feel about the experience as a whole can besignificantly impacted as a result.
Optimizing for choice
Avoid analysis paralysis by keeping the decision-making process in mind. Avoid overwhelming users by only showing one thing at a time (e.g. featured product), or by providing tools for narrowing down choices up front (e.g. search and filtering).
Optimizing for comparison
When comparison is necessary, we can avoid analysis paralysis by enabling side-by-side comparison of related items and options that require a decision (e.g. pricing tiers).
Origin
The idea of analysis paralysis has been expressed through narrative a number of times, beginning as far back the ancient fable The Fox and the Cat which was included in Aesop’s Fables. The two words first appeared together in an 1803 pronouncing dictionary and later editions stating how those words are pronounced similarly. In 1956, Charles R. Schwartz wrote the article “The Return-on-Investment Concept as a Tool for Decision Making” in Changing Patterns And Concepts In Management stating, “We will do less guessing; avoid the danger of becoming extinct by instinct; and, by the adoption of one uniform evaluation guide, escape succumbing to paralysis by analysis.”