One CTA or many Shortcuts?

Question

We're building a product where we can either give one main Call to Action on home screen (Mobile app) which conforms to Hick-Hyman law and reduces cognitive load to make a decision easy but lowers discoverability of other features; while on the other hand we can put 4-6 shortcuts on Home screen, trying to let the user cash in on Availability Heuristics or user reacts to atleast one of stimuli and we can improve our engagement/retention, if done right.

So, what do we do? Any similar case studies to recommend? If nothing then, how do I test it out without going through full usability testing due to lack of time.

EDIT: Added wireframe for clarification. Major question came because of 1st and 2nd screen but now 3rd seems a better solution(Chucked) but still need to verify somehow.

Note: Other important features were to be accessed from bottom tabs and bottom tabs would still be there even if I choose something like 2nd or 3rd option.

Answer 1

Depends on the importance of those 4-6 features you are thinking of using as shortcuts.

1. If they are not so important

it's better you use one CTA and as the user gets engaged with your application point out the remaining features.

2. If the features are important

then you want to think of Apple.com. For Apple, most of the products are important that's why they don't have one CTA, they have a large slideshow of banners along with the main top navigation.

EDIT:
For mobile app you go with showing feature shortcuts upfront because on small screens users may miss some feature as they are not visible at first glance.

Answer 2

Single or Multiple Call to Action (CTA)?

The key is ballance

I've seen a couple of A/B test on this problem, but they had mixed results. In some multiple CTAs were better and with others multiple CTA reduced the conversion rate. So the answer is: it depends on your current interface, users, context.

The problem is you can find balance through User or A/B testing. But if you don't have time for it you can follow this advice:

Advice

It really depends on the vertical length of the page and the pattern that your users scan or read your website. If they are not going below the fold then putting CTAs at the bottom of the page won't make much difference.

Heatmaps would be useful

If you can install a heatmap tracking of your page (which consists of just adding one JS library) you will get really valuable information. You can see how far down your users are scrolling with a scroll map and where they are clicking with click map. I suggest using hotjar or mouseflow as I've used them and they worked perfectly.

For short pages use 1 CTA and for long use 2 or 3 at maximum.

The number of CTA and their positioning should comply with where users are mostly concentrating their attention on the page. You want to find those places using the heatmaps and put CTA there.

In my opinion, there is no need for more than 2-3 CTAs on a single page because it clutters the interface and may discourage users clicking them because you are trying too hard to get them to your target page.