Affording choice: how website designs create and constrain 'choice'

Abstract

Nowadays, the web offers a world of choice, providing millions of options at the click of a button. Web-based platforms such as Amazon.com and Yelp.com provide users with a range of tools and functionalities to navigate and compare options within a complex and bewildering landscape of choice. Whilst such websites afford users the feeling of objective and ‘free’ choice, it is also clear that the design features and architecture of websites have strategic affordances for structuring choice in different ways and for particular aims and objectives. Based on a study of 500 top-ranking websites, in this paper, we argue for a re-evaluation of the relationship between choice and the web, through an examination of the affordances of websites for shaping and governing choice. Using illustrative examples and drawing on a conceptual framework from previous work, we examine four interconnected aspects of how choice is structured through the affordances of websites. We discuss the role of algorithms in governing choice through websites, including their role in drawing users into a political economy of choice-making that appears to ‘nudge’ them in particular directions. Websites not only constitute and structure choice, but also presuppose, deploy, and potentially (re)produce the characteristics and capacities of ‘choosers’, and as choosers are not equals this in turn may reproduce and reinforce social inequalities and fissures. The paper concludes with a reflection on the entangled trajectories of choice and web technologies, and how this might impact our understanding of choice in contemporary society.