I came across The Paradox of Choice in Kathy Sierra’s discussion of how much control applications should yield to users. Most products I encounter suffer from featuritis, i.e. the notion of “the more features the better.” This is how you end up with dialog boxes with three rows of tabs and a check box for everything under the sun.
Overabundance of choice leads to indecisiveness, aggravation, “buyer remorse” and other phenomena, as Barry Schwartz demonstrates in The Paradox of Choice. Understanding how people react to it is very important. Having read this book, I will never approach UI design the same way as before.
Below are some quotes I found very interesting. The quotes relate not so much to software design, as to everyday life situations in general. Since we develop software for humans, we can’t divorce the two. Where to draw the line between “too much” and “enough” is up to you to decide. I think, in most cases, reasonable defaults are the best of both worlds.
“We make the most of our freedoms by learning to make good choices about the things that matter, while at the same time unburdening ourselves from too much concern about the things that don’t.”
”[…] The growth of material affluence has not brought with it an increase in subjective well-being. […] We are actually experiencing a fairly significant decrease in well-being. [This is followed by statistics of increased divorce rates, suicides, violent crimes, etc.]”
”[…] We are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations. We earn more and spend more, but we spend less time with others.”
“Confronting any trade-off, it seems, is increasingly unsettling. And as the available alternatives increase, the extent to which choices will require trade-offs will increase as well.”
“Difficult trade-offs make it difficult to justify decisions, so decisions are deferred; easy trade-offs make it easy to justify decisions. And single options lie somewhere in the middle.”
”[…] Whenever we are forced to make decisions involving trade-offs, we will feel less good about the option we choose than we would have if the alternatives hadn’t been there.”
”[…] As the number of options under consideration goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternative will go down. This is one reason, and a very important one, why adding options can be detrimental to our well-being. Because we don’t put rejected options out of our minds, we experience disappointment of having our satisfaction with decisions diluted by all the options we considered but did not choose.”
“Language can affect the framing of an experience and thus, the setting of the [so called] zero point. A sign at a gas station that says “Discount for Paying Cash” sets the zero point at the credit card price. A sign that says “Surcharge for Using Credit” sets the zero point at the cash price. Though the difference between cash and credit may be the same at both gas stations, people will be annoyed at having to pay surcharge and delighted at getting a
discount.”
“We are living at the pinnacle of human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our ancestors could, at most, only dream about, but it has come at a great price. We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn’t satisfy us to the degree expected. […]
The ’success’ of modernity turns out to be bittersweet, and everywhere we look it appears that a significant contributing factor is the overabundance of choice. Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything.”
