If I could get the spacing juuuuusst right...
There are so many cognitive biases that influence us in our daily lives, but this one takes the cake for having the best nickname.
"The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task. [1]"
Bikeshedding it is!!
This particular bias really comes out when a team is building a new website. Especially for the homepage. Everyone has an opinion, everyone wants to tweak it here and there, and everyone has a dozen exmaples of why their opinions are valid.
I get it... we want to put our best brand foot forward. I am always guilty of this. It is insane how many minor adjustments I make on one section that I really want to get right regardless of its importance.
And that is the key issue here... when we put all our attention and focus and time on trivial aspects of our website, we give less attention, and focus and time towards the pages and things that are actually going to make an impact.
Here's a good example why this matters:
I love testing different pages on my website -- mostly product pages. That is where we send almost all paid traffic, so those pages are worth a lot more than others.
But recently I started an experiment on the homepage. I hadn't done a test on the homepage in a long time. So when I opened it a couple days after I launched it, I was a little surprised to see how many fewer visitors had been tracked compared to when I run PDP tests.
So far this test is winning... but the amount of traffic and conversions coming from visitors who landed on that page is so much less than our product pages.
So while it is still good to test the homepage, the impact will always be smaller.
And that is a good reminder to prioritize where time and resources are allocated.