The lazy load, endless scroll, and color slicing have to go

Hick’s Law has gone out the window, especially for neurodivergent users.

Forget a user’s mental load alone. Consider our human mental load. Most of us today are overwhelmed and overloaded by our daily lives. Our digital and physical experiences aren’t separate.

Whether you are trying to manage domestic tasks at home, support your family, get promoted at work, read the news, or browse online, you are in a chronic state of information overload.

UX Designers have a unique opportunity to create safe havens online where we can help reduce some of that load or even eliminate it altogether. But more often than not, we inadvertently add to it instead.

Asking users to carry such a huge cognitive load while they shop on an e-commerce website is a big ask, especially for neurodivergent users and those with memory issues. (Baymard #1777.)

Today’s e-commerce experience has more products to scroll through than one would ever imagine looking through in a brick-and-mortar store. Adding lazy loads and color-sliced products demands users to rely heavily on their working memory to decide what to buy or remember what they’ve already looked at in a list of hundreds of items.

At the same time, e-commerce websites fail to provide the necessary support to help users efficiently pare down their product list enough to feel confident in purchasing. Many users become so overwhelmed that they exit the site.

Human decision-making

Humans balance reason and emotion to make decisions. Without emotion, we’d be left to weigh the pros and cons of every single decision point for eternity. Without reason, we’d make rash decisions without thinking them through (and likely regret them.)

The see-saw effect of back-and-forth between the two allows us to make the best decisions. But that balancing act takes effort, focus, and clarity.

The overwhelmed shopper

The most perplexing aspect of the wide adoption of endless scrolling and lazy loading on e-commerce websites is color slicing.