Every time you walk into a chain store and see a stand of items that seems conveniently placed or when you log on to your favorite website to buy something and the item you want is on the front page, what you are seeing is the results of choice architecture. Choice architecture is the design of different ways in which choices can be presented to consumers and the impact of that presentation on consumer decision-making.(Wikipedia) The point is to try and take advantage of human behavior in order to more easily make a sell.
With online sales, the partitioning of attributes becomes important when impacting whether a consumer will choose a product.(Martin and Norton) In the paper "Shaping Online Consumer Choice by Partitioning the Web" by Jolie Martina and Michael Norton they found not only do the attributes presented gain more weight in how a consumer decides on their purchase but those attributes become even more important if it is a preference of the customer. This means not only is it important to correctly show important attributes of an item but to show those the consumers find important.
Steam is the perfect example of this. To start, on the Steam store you will immediately see the impacts of choice architecture. You are greeted with a list of featured and recommended games. These games are based on your previous purchases and games you have played. They are presented with what many consider important attributes in tags that classify the game like Action, Hack and Slash, and FPS. Then they present you with offers of games on sale. This choice architecture is designed to quickly greet you with easy to choose defaults to increase the likelihood you pick up the games. One thing that is well known in choice architecture is that people trend toward the default.
They also go even further in Steam by partitioning the game into several categories you can choose from. This the architecture that allows a consumer to more easily navigate to and make the purchase. The level of personalization is the aggregate of the data they collect and what you are seeing is the result of that.
In video games and stores we see choice architecture at work. The layout and the information presented are all carefully constructed to add ease in the purchasing decision. This is one of the reasons you might have more games then you could ever play in your Steam inventory. It was designed to make it easy to do so.
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