RnaLabs

Barry Schwartz, author of the book The Paradox of Choice, has some insight and research into how people make choices and filter the number of choices they have.

I’m interested in the ramifications of Barry’s book on information architecture and website design.
In a nutshell, the author asserts that we’ve always thought people should have more choices rather than fewer yet his research is saying there’s a point at which too many choices can be paralyzing.

From the Boxes and Arrows interview with Barry…

Barry Schwartz: In 50 years of research and psychology, there is study after study showing that people who are able to choose X were more satisfied than people who simply got X. But in all of those studies, the contrast was always with two options. And if two options are better than no choice, then three must be better than two, and four must be better than three, and so on. But no one ever studied that. The empirical basis for the idea is that the more choice people have, the better they are. And it seems perfectly reasonable.

What economist have said, more as a matter of theory than as a matter of empirical evidence, is that if you add options, you can’t make anyone any worse off. If you’re happy alternating between Cheerios and Rice Krispies, you can just keep doing that. And, if I add 50 other cereals, you’ll ignore them. And if I don’t like Cheerios and Rice Krispies, chances are that one of those 50 cereals that have been added will be just the ticket.

Adding options is bound to make somebody better off, and further, it won’t make anybody worse off. The more choice people have, the better they are. So how could it not be true?

It’s not true.

But it’s only in the last five years that people have started doing research where instead of having two options, people have 20 or 200. And when you cross a line (and you are probably going to ask me “where’s the line?” and I’m going to say, ”I don’t know; nobody knows”), choice goes from being beneficial to being paralyzing. So one effect of too many choices is that people can’t choose at all…

The consistent problem in all of this is that people don’t know what’s good for them. If you offer people a limited range of options and a large set, most people will choose the large set. They’ll go and try to pick something, and they’ll walk out empty handed shaking their heads. So everyone’s kind of swallowed the ideology that more is better than less.

Read the full interview on Boxes and Arrows >>
Watch the Google video of Barry’s talk at Google >>

Somewhere between counting the firings of neurons and calculating profit and loss statements is a useful set of boundaries that define what to consider in a design process, and it’s not just making things easy to use. Usability does not equate to user experience. The specific boundaries vary with each product, audience and situation. I have found the following to be a decent working guideline: The user experience consists of all of the factors that influence the relationship between the end user and an organization, especially when a product mediates that relationship. The key part of this definition, for me, is the relationship of the organization to the product. To me, the user experience is incomplete without a consideration of the organization that created the experience. The end result is the intersection of an organization’s goals and that organization’s understanding of users’ goals, and it’s the designer and researcher’s role to mediate a compromise between these. This means, more simply, that you must look inward and understand why you’re making something at the same time you look outward to understand what people want from it.

From Mike Kuniavsky

“Usability cost-benefit data shows that including usability in product development actually cuts the time to market and increases sales because usability and ease of use build quality into products and catch many expensive problems early on in the cycle when they can be addressed at lower cost. Finally, working with users from the beginning of a product cycle ensures that the product is being designed so that users will be satisfied.”
- Claire Marie Karat, “A business case approach to usability cost justification.” In, R. Bias and D. Mayhew, Eds. Cost-Justifying Usability, Academic Press, NY, 1994.