How Testmap for Jira is addressing the paradox of choice issue

Have you ever opened up a video-editing-software like DaVinci Resolve?

If you have, your first reaction was most likely something like "Ok, where the hell do I even start?", right?

Paradox of Choice

In behavioral economics, this is called "Paradox of Choice". While your first thought may be, that the more options the better for the customer, this turns out to be a wrong assumption in many circumstances.

One famous experiment conducted was putting 24 different varieties of jam on a display table in a grocery store and compare the user behaviout to another situation, where there are only 6 flavours.

Result

While more people showed up at the display table with 24 varieties in total, people in the second experiment were actually more likely to buy something.

The researchers concluded that having too many options might actually cause someone not to make a purchase or decision at all.

Meaning for the digital world

What does it mean for any company designing and implementing a software solution?

Well, you have to be aware that putting countless buttons and options on to the user's screeen, giving the user no guidance at all, will probably have a negative impact on how many users will perceive your product in terms of usability.

That is one reason why, for example, in recent years more and more companies started to integrate product-tours or onboarding-tours into their products.

If you have been a part of bigger software projects where Jira Software was the project management tool of choice, you are probably painfully aware of dashboards like this one:

Now, if you are the testmanager who has configured this dashboard for hours (and spent even more times maintaining it), you know where to look for on this dashboard, given a specific question. But even you had to spent quite some time figuring out what possibilities exists in terms of widgets and filtering.

Yet, what about all the other stakeholders, who are not power-users?

A project manager or business analyst usually does not need to configure such a dashboard but will anyone of them find it easy to find value in such a see of - on the surface at least - uncoherent information? Even worse, usually you can even scroll down quite a bit to find even more data.

Testmap for Jira

With our solution "Testmap for Jira", we are re-thinking how testmanagement-controlling should be done in bigger corporates.

If you want to know more about out software, you can visit this link to get a comprehensive overview.