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April 2, 2025
High-consideration purchases can carry a heavy cognitive load. By definition, “high consideration” means the customer has to consider multiple variables, and the cost of an incorrect decision is high.
For brands offering high-consideration products and services, simply providing great value isn’t enough. Companies must proactively reduce uncertainty, provide relevant information at the right time, and guide customers towards a confident decision. This is where UX research plays a crucial part. It helps uncover what consumers need to feel reassured and how to best support them throughout the buying journey.
High-consideration purchases are unique due to high stakes. For example:
✦ Financial stakes: Certain high-end products are expensive investments. Consumers may hesitate due to cost and potential buyer’s remorse later.
✦ Emotional stakes: Some products and services may affect one’s family. This makes the decision complex and highly personal.
✦ Professional stakes: Choices B2B buyers make will impact their company’s reputation and operations. Mistakes can be costly and difficult to undo as switching costs are extremely high.
In every purchase decision, there are rational and emotional components. One is never void of the other, even in B2B.
With high consideration purchases, both are amplified. Rationally, consumers need detailed information to justify the cost. Emotionally, they need to feel confident in their decision. Buyers try to educate themselves to the highest degree possible in order to mitigate risk and maximize their chances of making the best decision. If doubts come up, they may delay the purchase, or abandon it altogether.
This means, we as brands have to make sure the online experience is optimized for the customer’s thought process. We have to learn what we don't know about the user's mind state as they're progressing through the funnel, and deliver what they are looking for.
For example, we have worked with a number of companies in the travel and tourism space. Usability studies have shown that the level of detail consumers are looking for is quite extensive. They want to know everything from the thread count, to the square footage, to the cardinal direction that the windows face and so on. There is a lot of information that goes into consideration, and if you aren't providing these details, it gives room for doubt, and other aggregator sites or competitors may win out.
Financial and legal services companies also fall into the category of “high-consideration” too. While what they offer is not irreversible, there are usually sunk costs if a consumer were to change their mind. For example, we have worked with Trust & Will for several years, which sells trusts and wills online. A trust or a will is often something a customer does once, and they're done. For Trust and Will as a company, online user experience is one of those rare opportunities to capture someone's attention enough for them to feel—“This is the right solution for me, and this is the right solution provider”.
With high-consideration purchases, you have one shot to get it right. If you don't do the best job you can, your competitors will, and they will win the business. This is where the right funnel with the right information makes all the difference.
Brands often want to tout every feature, show a big comparison table, move the prospect to chat, or jump into sales. Some of these may be the right elements, but we have to make sure they are the right ones, at the right time, for the maximum number of prospects who enter the funnel.
In order to do that, we have to ask users what they like, what they don't like, and what their sentiment is about our products. As marketers, we might be tempted to over-educate a prospective customer about all the benefits and the state of greatness they will reach once they choose our product. However, if we overwhelm them too early, or present information in the wrong order, none of these messages may land, and may not get the customer into a confident emotional state to make the purchase decision.
UX research helps pinpoint the right moments to introduce different types of information.
Brands have to learn about the users’ mind state directly from them.
While it’s hard to prescribe a specific toolbox as there may be different ways to approach a challenge, we've seen diary studies work really well for high-consideration consumer products. These are longitudinal studies where the consumer is engaged through the entire consideration and purchase process. They are noting what they like, dislike, their wants and needs all the way from the first introduction to the product, through considering the product, purchasing and consuming the product. Diary studies are a great way to understand the entire journey and uncover breakdowns in it. They help brands improve not just digital experiences but also marketing and customer service strategies.
While diary studies can be very illuminating, effective user research doesn’t have to be so complex. Simple Post-Purchase Surveys can help brands refine messaging and address common objections.
A question like “What would you change about this experience?” as a quick email to users after the purchase can offer a lot of insight. A question “What almost stopped you from buying?” can help uncover hidden barriers.
For B2B companies, Customer Interviews can be very powerful.
A B2B client of ours that offers a complex steel structure configuration tool, learned from customer interviews that users rarely bought in a single session. The initial goal of the company was to build a new portal that allowed prospects to configure their building, get pricing and complete their order—all in a single session. However, a key insight that was uncovered early in stakeholder and customer interviews was that most prospects don't sit down, configure the building, get the price, and place their order. They sit down, start to configure the building, walk away, learn more about it, have other things to do, come back, go to lunch, come back again, etc.
We learned that in reality, this was a multi-session process. The intuition behind “Where do I start? Where can I stop, save and restart later?” wasn't clean. This forced abandonment or prospects jumping on the phone and asking the reps to finish their order.
After learning about the multi-session process, the company made the flow easier to pause and feel good about it, so the prospects could step away and return later, instead of abandoning completely. It was a subtle change, but it made a big difference. The new portal experience accommodated both single-session and multi-session experiences.
When we suggest doing user interviews in the B2B context, we often hear “I don’t know, people are busy…”. It’s true, today everyone's busy, but we find over and over again that B2B customers are happy to provide their feedback because they feel that it's going to improve the product and their experience with the company. It's worth asking!
A successful step for a lot of our B2B customers has been building a Customer Advisory Board, also known as a CAB, which is a pool of customers or users who are happy to raise their hand and provide feedback. If you are a B2B company and you haven't done this already, do it now, so you can reap the rewards in the future.
As a B2B brand, you already know who your power users are. These power users are vocal about what features they like and don’t like. It's a lot easier to consult with them than try to recruit a narrow audience from a broad pool. Having your own customer advisory board eliminates the recruiting challenge.
Customer interviews can also be used for a post-design check, before the build process starts. Imagine, you have gone through the collective decision-making of what the new online experience would look like, now it’s time to get these new designs in front of users! There may have been trade-offs or jumps in logic that you made throughout the design process that might not work for your customers, and you wouldn’t know unless you ask them.
This additional round of review may slow down the project by a couple of weeks, but it’s a small price to pay for a better, more effective experience for everyone.
In the B2C realm, it always pays to test assumptions. We did a project with Graco Baby where we were mapping out new personalizations for several buyer personas: expecting parents, first-time parents, parents with multiples, friends and family buying gifts for parents. We built out initial designs and showed them to the users. Their reactions were very interesting—along the lines of “Don't get in the way of me doing what I want to do”. It was a great reminder that users crave autonomy and that we can't be interrupting people's journeys, even if we are trying to create a more relevant experience for them.
In summary, high-consideration purchases – either B2B and B2C – require brands to build trust, provide clarity, and support a confident decision. UX research can help uncover essential customer needs, reduce hesitation, and build a seamless experience.
At CXperts, we specialize in custom UX research that helps brands provide a world-class experience and stay aligned with evolving consumer expectations. Reach out to us today and let’s talk about how a UX Research project tailored to your specific needs could help your brand reach ambitious growth goals and strengthen long-term customer relationships.
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