The research is clear that people like having a lot of choices, but that providing a lot of choices not only makes it harder for them to take action, but may also induce stress.

Designers often make decisions based on preference, not performance. Many designs inundate the target audience with choices.

For example, a search for an external hard drive on Amazon brings back 21,287 results. According to the Huffington Post, Starbucks has said there are over 80,000 choices you can make in ordering a beverage.

Designing to reduce the number of choices that needs to be made is called anticipatory design.

Anticipatory design is built on a few key ideas:

Too many choices leads to poor decisions.Many, if not most, choices are unnecessary.Design can eliminate unnecessary choices.

This brings up an interesting question: Is the role of the designer to present the user with all the choices in the easiest possible way for the user to digest and act? Or is the role of the designer to anticipate what choices are really relevant and present only those? Anticipatory design advocates would say the latter is correct. Even more, anticipatory design is about making and implementing decisions for the user—automatically, and without user input. The goal is not to help the user make a decision, but to anticipate what the user needs and just do it.

Note
In the 1950s, Buckminster Fuller taught a course at MIT about anticipatory design—a concept he developed in 1927—but it really means something different. However, if you search online for the term anticipatory design, you’ll likely encounter Fuller’s version of the term.

Takeaways

Anticipatory design doesn’t mean you decide what people want. It means doing enough research that you’re confident that you know what their decisions will be—and then delivering that.Rethink your role as designer. What would you do differently if your role were to relieve the user from making as many decisions as possible?Try out anticipatory design.