How to design engaging and beautiful pricing tables that sell

Pricing comparison tables done by most companies are terrible. If there were a subtler way to say this, I would have. But there isn’t. On the bright side, Apple is using some psychological tricks in its pricing tables that enable them to sell loads of hardware products while following Hick’s Law.

Most pricing tables online look like this 👇. If you haven’t already guessed, these were taken from Grammarly and Netflix’s websites. Unfortunately, they look very dull to act upon. Rather than making it simpler for the users to act upon, they make it harder for the users to choose because they don’t utilize any of the visual cues to make the decision-making process simpler.

Grammarly vs Netflix

So to cut it short, pricing tables are designed and exist to make it easy for the users to make a purchase decision. Companies realize that when they offer competing products, then it becomes hard for the user to distinguish between each of the products easy to make the final purchase decision, and hence, they put together a comparison table to make the process easier (on the brain).

Let’s look at how the decision-making process happens scientifically.

Decision Making in the Human Brain

According to the research paper titled “An Algorithmic Model of Decision Making in the Human Brain” published in the National Center for Biotechnology information —

The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) and hippocampus are the most critical parts of the human brain for decision making. The decision-making process contains four steps. In the first step, some initial stimuli produced by sensory inputs, excite a set of hippocampal neurons as part of the neural system. In the second step, a set of secondary stimuli arrives in the hippocampus, and the stimulusdriven neural response is produced as initial information for two entry stimulus sets in the hippocampus. In the third step, the initial information is sent to PFC. The PFC determines the additional required information and retrieves complementary information from the hippocampus (Wang, 2008). In the last step, the PFC decides the proposed controlling process in this study. However, there is a mutual communication between PFC and hippocampus with neural connectivity. This neural wiring makes closed-loop neural circuits to generate a preferred decision.

How does decision-making happen in your brain?

Hick’s Law

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s understand what Hick’s Law says about decision-making and choices —

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

This means that the more choices we have, the worse it will be for the users because it will take them longer to make a decision. This means the possibility of them discarding and moving away from the decision process also increases with the number of choices presented to them.

But four other takeaways are derived from Hick’s Law that was stated above. We’ll evaluate Apple’s entry-level product into its ecosystem — iPhone’s Pricing Table against these four takeaways.

#1 Minimize choices when response times are critical to increasing decision time

Choosing an iPhone model

Apple breaches the sweet spot by adding just another choice in its iPhone line-up, that is, the iPhone SE. Without it, each of the iPhones is split across with a 200$ difference and offers a set of choices that nudges the users to buy either the most loaded option or the one in the middle. The first set of decision-making processes happens by taking into account the phone’s size, color, or price of the iPhone. This information is conveniently placed close to the phone’s imagery with a solid-filled BUY button to allow the purchase to happen lightning fast.

#2 Break complex tasks into smaller steps to decrease cognitive load

Smaller Step towards a Bigger Comparison

There is a lot that goes on when a person is deciding to buy the next iPhone but Apple hides most of the information and only displays the information that can aid the user in making the decision faster. Beyond the size, color, and price point, Apple knows that people are more and more looking forward to the battery capacity, camera system, cellular system, and speed of their latest iPhones. All of these are placed one after another.

To decrease the cognitive load, Apple doesn’t simply rely on text but adds small icons to help the user compare various options easily. The icons are a major distinguishing factor when it comes to pricing tables on Apple’s website and the ones on Netflix for example. Icons make the table visually readable and allow users to skip thru the information that is not important to them.

#3 Avoid overwhelming users by highlighting recommended options

The “New” tag

To reduce bias towards a particular iPhone model, Apple doesn’t necessarily highlight a particular option and force users to buy the model but indirectly it does build up the hype around their latest models.

Here is how Apple highlights the recommended options —

1. The latest models have a “New” tag beside them. Like here you can see the tag for iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14.
2. All the previous models are phased out and hidden from the user’s view after a recent launch.
3. When comparing the latest models are in the front and the oldest in the back.
4. The entire iPhone landing/splash page is about the latest model and its offerings. This means that at the end of the page, people will most probably want to buy the latest model.

#4 Use progressive onboarding to minimize cognitive load for new users

Look at that side frame metal shine like a 💎

The build-up. Apple designs these spectacular Splash Pages to let the users immerse themselves in the hype of their latest and greatest launches. You can read more about them here 👇

Progressive disclosure in the case of Apple is building an elaborate splash page explaining and breaking down each of their product features before presenting the users an option to compare different model, their offerings, and purchase option.

You can read more about Hick’s Law here: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/hick-s-law-making-the-choice-easier-for-users

That’s all for this post. I hope you learned something about how Apple is making use of classic psychological tricks to make us buy their products. More on the branding breakdown later.