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There are a couple of popular TED talks about choice. http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_

There are a couple of popular TED talks about choice. http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch... It's something to keep in mind with your development work as well. Let's say you create an application to minify javascript. Your app has an input field, and a button that says 'Go', and that's it. Very simple, no confusion, people love it. However, you notice 5% of people don't use the app, because they want to keep comments in their minified code, and you don't include that option. A lot of developers decide they'll add a checkbox to include comments, because now everyone can be happy. It doesn't quite work that way, because now the 95% of people that don't want comments see this checkbox, and start to question themselves. Wait, why do people want comments included in their minified code, should I be checking this box? Is there something I'm doing wrong? Do most people check the box or not, I'd like to know to validate my decision, otherwise I feel uneasy. The more options you add, the more this has an effect. In the end, maybe the 95% are feeling so uneasy, 10% of them leave to another app, that just has a 'Go' button again, so they feel confident, and more happy. So, by adding the checkbox to include comments, the 5% of people that were asking for the feature now start using the app, but you lose 10% of the original audience because of the additional choice. It's a difficult balance, and you really need to focus on the majority, and be careful about building out features the minority are requesting. If you look at apps like Twitter or Snapchat (or Yo, on the extreme side, and not yet proven), they succeed by limiting the amount of choice available to users. Many developers would have added more options, or in the case of Twitter given users the ability to write longer tweets because it seems harmless, but at the same time, it would have caused the businesses to fail.

saurik 12y ago
> In the end, maybe the 95% are feeling so uneasy, 10% of them leave to another app, that just has a 'Go' button again, so they feel confident, and more happy. You can't knowingly hide from choice: the existence of a different application that only has the Go button is not an escape, it is just yet another choice. The exact same story you described within the microcosm of the single application now plays out between the two applications, as the prospective user wonders why the application with the checkbox exists, as its very existence implies that maybe they should carefully consider whether they should be checking that box. Only now there are even more complex issues to decide: do the two applications even work the same in the situation that don't check the box? Now, even if you kind of think you want the comments, maybe you should be using this new application because maybe it works better in some way you don't quite understand... so you have to research the two applications or even test them against your files, coming up with your own (potentially flawed!) metric of comparison. Your model thereby only works for the percentage of people who have only heard about one application or the other: anyone who saw both applications has also seen the checkbox, and the choice inherently must have been decided in order for them to now be using the second application. Even if the first application is discontinued, the user will forever wonder if the newer applications they are forced to use instead are flawed because they don't have the checkbox, and despite never having actually checked the box, might question sometimes why someone would have even added such a checkbox were it not sometimes a good idea, and now the uneasiness simply consumes what they are working on: the task of minifying JavaScript itself maybe can never be satisfying. To the extent to which people actually are "leaving" an application because it has too many options, I thereby argue the real problem is not decision fatigue or crippling doubt, but in fact simply "confusion": they don't actually know what all the options do, or find the process of setting the options frustrating, and thereby move to a simpler application not because it frees them from having to make decisions (as again: decisions can only ever accumulate, they can never be taken away), but because it makes the process of actually using the application more straightforward and less cluttered. You also can't model "limits" as removed decisions: Twitter limiting me to 140 characters actually makes my word choice really matter... I end up having to draft multiple versions of what I need to say in the hope of finding one that I can whittle to under 140 characters. I have friends help me decide which of the variants conveys the idea the best, and sometimes I have to decide to split the message into multiple parts (but as each will be replied to and retweeted separately, deciding what information needs to be replicated in both, but in a way that isn't awkward, is itself a difficult decision). I often just go "bah, this is too complex", and not send anything; whereas on Facebook or reddit, where I have no length limits, I tend to just type something and send it: with this comment, while I did a little editing afterwards, it was nowhere near the ordeal that happens when I have to start making decisions due to hitting a limit. I would in fact argue that all limits lead to decisions: a limit is effectively a constrained resource, and now you have to decide how to spend that constrained resource to best accomplish your goal; a system that does not impose a limit frees the user to always do what felt most natural in the moment, however wasteful. The argument with Twitter not breaking free of their SMS-limited history is usually along the lines of either "if the messages are so long people won't be able to quickly read a bunch of them", not "giving people the ability to type a lot means they will not bother typing at all"... I think we can attest to the shear volume of trite YouTube comments to demonstrate that people are quite happy stopping typing once they've stated their peace ;P.
- im3w1l 12y ago
  I don't think the argument from your first two paragraphs holds in the general case, when there are lots of options. The first reason is that the user doesn't know which choices have been made for them by the developer. Imagining that the developers made good choices is not hard. The second reason is that when no choice is given the user, then the developer is responsible. If the application works poorly it is the developers fault, and not the users for having clicked a stupid combination of checkboxes. If the user claims the reply will not be a smug reply how they should have read the manual and made better choices. The third reason is reputation. If you hear good things about a program with little choice, then you know the devloper made good choices for you. If you hear good things about a program with lots of choices, then that may only mean that it works well when you made all of those choices in clever ways.
- Throwaway823 12y ago
  About your first point, I don't think that's true. For example, I visit the store to buy toothpaste. I might see 25 different kinds of Colgate, and 1 kind of Crest. Personally, I'd likely buy the Crest, because I can't decide between all the Colgate options of Ultrabrite, Optic White, Sparkling White, Sensitive, Sensitive Pro-Relief, Max Fresh, 2in1, Cavity Protection, Total, Total Advanced, Total Action, and Triple Action (these are all real names, and they have more). You're saying I should see 26 individual options to compare and be overwhelmed with choice. However, if I buy Crest, I'm happy. This is because I trust their knowledge of toothpaste over my own, and pass the decision making to them. I assume their single option has the best formula. If I choose between Ultrabrite, Sparkling White and Optic White from Colgate, I'm less satisfied, because I'm unsure if I made the right choice, because I don't have a PhD in toothpaste. This is no different than software. If Bing releases 100 new options to customize your experience with the search engine, does this make you less satisfied with using Google? Does it make you feel overwhelmed in choice? Not at all, if anything, you're even more happy with Google now. We just assume when someone gives us less choice, they're making the right choices for us.
  - discipline 12y ago
    To my untrained ear, this sounds like an argument over optimal versus satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing). (I'm just tossing that out there: if this is something you already know about, just ignore my comment. I'll let myself out now...)
keerthiko 12y ago
This is exactly how I felt about many of Medium.com's recent changes to their editor. It was well loved before because it was very straight-forward -- enter title, write piece. Now there's all kinds of options and flexibility and customization, and it's turning into just another online writing platform.
userbinator 12y ago
Personally, while the research is interesting, I think it's also being far too overused as justification to remove/not add options. The common counterargument of "just use another product that does have the option you want" often turns out to be as fruitless - that other product may not have some option you want (that this one does), due to the same reasoning! I also fundamentally disagree that removing choices is a good thing - the research says it makes (most?) people feel better, which suggests that they don't want to think about making any choices because it is somehow difficult for them and causes anxiety. Logically, this means they would be most satisfied and happy if they didn't have to make any choices or do any thinking at all, and something/someone else made all the decisions for them - the equivalent of having no freedom or control over one's life. Is this really what we want society to become? "Making choices is hard, so just give up"? To me, that's where it looks like things are heading, and quite frankly it's a rather disturbing trend. I most definitely do not want to have nearly every decision in my life made by someone else, and find the anxiety/difficulty of the process to be absolutely normal. Maybe there is a good balance somewhere in between, but I'm definitely strongly biased in the direction of being able to have the freedom to make choices, no matter how difficult, and take control of my life.
- Throwaway823 12y ago
  There is balance but it's not easy to find. If I visit a restaurant, and they only serve chicken, that's kind of limited. Now, they give me the option of beef or chicken. Ok, this is a decision I can make, and be confident in selecting. Now, what happens if they ask whether I would like northwestern chicken, southern chicken, grain fed chicken, or korean chicken? Huh? I'm not a master of chicken, just give me the best one. We hit a point where I no longer have a strong opinion, and this is where my confidence drops, and I start to question myself. This means they've given me too much choice. This isn't the same for everyone, someone out there knows their chicken inside and out, and they have a preference for one specific type. If you want to cater your restaurant towards those people then give them that choice. However, you'll be scaring away the average person at the same time. For the same reason it's difficult to make an application for casual and advanced users. Pick your audience, and that'll give you some guidance on the appropriate amount of choice to include.
colanderman 12y ago
I think Doodle handles this well; it provides a single clear path for its 90% use case, and hides extra options in dropdowns that clearly designate those options as "abnormal", but nonetheless acceptable.
kylec 12y ago
I don't know if a single choice would throw many people off, but there's certainly software out there where there's a thriving ecosystem built on top of it to reduce its complexity and number of choices. Ffmpeg comes to mind. I've never used it directly, but I've used several apps that wrap over it and provide the user a constrained list of options that are presumably optimized for different scenarios. I then don't have to worry about selecting a set of bad options and wasting time creating and disk space storing bad conversions.

saurik 12y ago

> In the end, maybe the 95% are feeling so uneasy, 10% of them leave to another app, that just has a 'Go' button again, so they feel confident, and more happy. You can't knowingly hide from choice: the existence of a different application that only has the Go button is not an escape, it is just yet another choice. The exact same story you described within the microcosm of the single application now plays out between the two applications, as the prospective user wonders why the application with the checkbox exists, as its very existence implies that maybe they should carefully consider whether they should be checking that box. Only now there are even more complex issues to decide: do the two applications even work the same in the situation that don't check the box? Now, even if you kind of think you want the comments, maybe you should be using this new application because maybe it works better in some way you don't quite understand... so you have to research the two applications or even test them against your files, coming up with your own (potentially flawed!) metric of comparison. Your model thereby only works for the percentage of people who have only heard about one application or the other: anyone who saw both applications has also seen the checkbox, and the choice inherently must have been decided in order for them to now be using the second application. Even if the first application is discontinued, the user will forever wonder if the newer applications they are forced to use instead are flawed because they don't have the checkbox, and despite never having actually checked the box, might question sometimes why someone would have even added such a checkbox were it not sometimes a good idea, and now the uneasiness simply consumes what they are working on: the task of minifying JavaScript itself maybe can never be satisfying. To the extent to which people actually are "leaving" an application because it has too many options, I thereby argue the real problem is not decision fatigue or crippling doubt, but in fact simply "confusion": they don't actually know what all the options do, or find the process of setting the options frustrating, and thereby move to a simpler application not because it frees them from having to make decisions (as again: decisions can only ever accumulate, they can never be taken away), but because it makes the process of actually using the application more straightforward and less cluttered. You also can't model "limits" as removed decisions: Twitter limiting me to 140 characters actually makes my word choice really matter... I end up having to draft multiple versions of what I need to say in the hope of finding one that I can whittle to under 140 characters. I have friends help me decide which of the variants conveys the idea the best, and sometimes I have to decide to split the message into multiple parts (but as each will be replied to and retweeted separately, deciding what information needs to be replicated in both, but in a way that isn't awkward, is itself a difficult decision). I often just go "bah, this is too complex", and not send anything; whereas on Facebook or reddit, where I have no length limits, I tend to just type something and send it: with this comment, while I did a little editing afterwards, it was nowhere near the ordeal that happens when I have to start making decisions due to hitting a limit. I would in fact argue that all limits lead to decisions: a limit is effectively a constrained resource, and now you have to decide how to spend that constrained resource to best accomplish your goal; a system that does not impose a limit frees the user to always do what felt most natural in the moment, however wasteful. The argument with Twitter not breaking free of their SMS-limited history is usually along the lines of either "if the messages are so long people won't be able to quickly read a bunch of them", not "giving people the ability to type a lot means they will not bother typing at all"... I think we can attest to the shear volume of trite YouTube comments to demonstrate that people are quite happy stopping typing once they've stated their peace ;P.

im3w1l 12y ago
I don't think the argument from your first two paragraphs holds in the general case, when there are lots of options. The first reason is that the user doesn't know which choices have been made for them by the developer. Imagining that the developers made good choices is not hard. The second reason is that when no choice is given the user, then the developer is responsible. If the application works poorly it is the developers fault, and not the users for having clicked a stupid combination of checkboxes. If the user claims the reply will not be a smug reply how they should have read the manual and made better choices. The third reason is reputation. If you hear good things about a program with little choice, then you know the devloper made good choices for you. If you hear good things about a program with lots of choices, then that may only mean that it works well when you made all of those choices in clever ways.
Throwaway823 12y ago
About your first point, I don't think that's true. For example, I visit the store to buy toothpaste. I might see 25 different kinds of Colgate, and 1 kind of Crest. Personally, I'd likely buy the Crest, because I can't decide between all the Colgate options of Ultrabrite, Optic White, Sparkling White, Sensitive, Sensitive Pro-Relief, Max Fresh, 2in1, Cavity Protection, Total, Total Advanced, Total Action, and Triple Action (these are all real names, and they have more). You're saying I should see 26 individual options to compare and be overwhelmed with choice. However, if I buy Crest, I'm happy. This is because I trust their knowledge of toothpaste over my own, and pass the decision making to them. I assume their single option has the best formula. If I choose between Ultrabrite, Sparkling White and Optic White from Colgate, I'm less satisfied, because I'm unsure if I made the right choice, because I don't have a PhD in toothpaste. This is no different than software. If Bing releases 100 new options to customize your experience with the search engine, does this make you less satisfied with using Google? Does it make you feel overwhelmed in choice? Not at all, if anything, you're even more happy with Google now. We just assume when someone gives us less choice, they're making the right choices for us.
- discipline 12y ago
  To my untrained ear, this sounds like an argument over optimal versus satisficing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing). (I'm just tossing that out there: if this is something you already know about, just ignore my comment. I'll let myself out now...)

keerthiko 12y ago

This is exactly how I felt about many of Medium.com's recent changes to their editor. It was well loved before because it was very straight-forward -- enter title, write piece. Now there's all kinds of options and flexibility and customization, and it's turning into just another online writing platform.

userbinator 12y ago

Personally, while the research is interesting, I think it's also being far too overused as justification to remove/not add options. The common counterargument of "just use another product that does have the option you want" often turns out to be as fruitless - that other product may not have some option you want (that this one does), due to the same reasoning! I also fundamentally disagree that removing choices is a good thing - the research says it makes (most?) people feel better, which suggests that they don't want to think about making any choices because it is somehow difficult for them and causes anxiety. Logically, this means they would be most satisfied and happy if they didn't have to make any choices or do any thinking at all, and something/someone else made all the decisions for them - the equivalent of having no freedom or control over one's life. Is this really what we want society to become? "Making choices is hard, so just give up"? To me, that's where it looks like things are heading, and quite frankly it's a rather disturbing trend. I most definitely do not want to have nearly every decision in my life made by someone else, and find the anxiety/difficulty of the process to be absolutely normal. Maybe there is a good balance somewhere in between, but I'm definitely strongly biased in the direction of being able to have the freedom to make choices, no matter how difficult, and take control of my life.

Throwaway823 12y ago
There is balance but it's not easy to find. If I visit a restaurant, and they only serve chicken, that's kind of limited. Now, they give me the option of beef or chicken. Ok, this is a decision I can make, and be confident in selecting. Now, what happens if they ask whether I would like northwestern chicken, southern chicken, grain fed chicken, or korean chicken? Huh? I'm not a master of chicken, just give me the best one. We hit a point where I no longer have a strong opinion, and this is where my confidence drops, and I start to question myself. This means they've given me too much choice. This isn't the same for everyone, someone out there knows their chicken inside and out, and they have a preference for one specific type. If you want to cater your restaurant towards those people then give them that choice. However, you'll be scaring away the average person at the same time. For the same reason it's difficult to make an application for casual and advanced users. Pick your audience, and that'll give you some guidance on the appropriate amount of choice to include.

colanderman 12y ago

I think Doodle handles this well; it provides a single clear path for its 90% use case, and hides extra options in dropdowns that clearly designate those options as "abnormal", but nonetheless acceptable.

kylec 12y ago

I don't know if a single choice would throw many people off, but there's certainly software out there where there's a thriving ecosystem built on top of it to reduce its complexity and number of choices. Ffmpeg comes to mind. I've never used it directly, but I've used several apps that wrap over it and provide the user a constrained list of options that are presumably optimized for different scenarios. I then don't have to worry about selecting a set of bad options and wasting time creating and disk space storing bad conversions.