Video: The Paradox of Choice, or Why Apple Only Sells Four Computers
Psychologist Barry Schwartz's talk at TED 2005 about why greater freedom of choice may lead to misery, not happiness. Some sort little notes/quotes:
• 6.5 million stereo combinations could be created from the components available in a typical retail store.
• Phones are confusing because they offer too many features.
• All the choice makes it possible to get a product better suited to our specific needs, but the process of selecting may make us feel worse. Adding options increases expectations in light of lack of perfection.
• The secret to happiness is low expectations.
• Material affluence enables choice, which leads to peculiar depression.
From personal experience, I can't help but think he's on to something. The less I focus on getting everything just so in my material life, instead focussing on the problem at hand, the more content I seem to become with what I have. For example, I wanted to be able to stream MP3s into my living room from a network drive. I bought a SqueezeBox. It works, mostly, and gives me free reign over my entire MP3 collection.
But it adds something else that can (and does) break in my network, another interface to learn and master, and doesn't ultimately do more than simply bringing my iPod into the other room and plugging it directly in could do considering how infrequently I actually listen to music. And it adds to the glut, another object in my life for which I have only mild affection, instead of one that I feel betters my life in ways proportionate to the amount of attention I give it.
(That's nothing against the Squeezebox specifically; it could be anything that does its intended job. The failing is in my expectations, not its attempt to meet them.)
[via Daring Fireball]
the latest
latest episodes
Honda is the same way in the car business...
Small (Fit)
Medium (Civic)
Large (Accord)
Small SUV (CR-v)
Small work truck (Element)
Large SUV (pilot)
Minivan (Odyssey)
Pickup (Ridgeline, HA)
Sportscar (S2000)
and that is IT. Even within a car, it is just 1-4 trim levels and no real options.
Simplicity sells.
I'm reminded of the song "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds:
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
That's why I confine my browsing to AOL and MSN.
And just stick with what CNN and Fox News tell me.
(Some of us actually enjoy comparing feature sets.)
TEDTalks are great! You can subscribe to them as an audio or video podcast - I just do audio so I can listen while driving or folding laundry. They are always informative and inspiring, very much in line with the boingboing sensibility.
As a person who has been trying to settle on just the right shade of green paint for my dining room, I totally understand what Mr. Schwartz is talking about.
I understand where he's coming from, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true. Too much choice can be overwhelming but, at the same time, too little is a bad thing too. I don't think the key is necessarily reducing/limiting your choice, so much as not worrying so much about whether or not you made the right one.
Restaurant menus too! My favorite menu ever was at Johnny Rockets where the menu is one side of a single sheet of cardboard (haven't been there in years so this may have changed). Contrast this with the Cheesecake Factory where the menu must have at least 20 pages! There's much to be said for editing and focus.
As far as the right shade of green paint for your walls; we like color and every room in our house is different color but after years of wasted cans of paint due to poor choices we now have a color lady who (for less than a few cans of paint) makes the process fun and exciting by talking to us and eventually giving us the Johnny Rockets list of palettes.
Thank goodness for eliminating customer choice! Must be the reason for Apple's dominant market share.
This morning I realized I had to take a series of closely spaced photographs in differing wavelength ranges with differing fields of view for a proposal I'm writing. Tomorrow I'll be using my trusty Nikon Coolpix 990 with interchangeable teleconverters coupled with an IR filter and mounted on a wide baseline stereo bar. If only Nikon would only sell fixed focus cameras with no attachments!
How about spending top dollar for a new gadget after doing all the research and one aspect of it (battery life, for instance) renders it utterly disappointing after all.
I thought I was one up on all the sucker iPod owners a few years back when they all had battery issues and my brand new Cowon player supported video and ran forever. Today, I'm considering an iPod. (Not really.)
"Material affluence enables choice, which leads to peculiar depression."
-in SOME people! The rest of us laugh at or pity the whiners who can't handle their own good fortune and suggest they suck it up and/or hand it over to us. If anyone here is having trouble coping with their affluence, I will gladly help redistribute it for them.
Reason had a very nice critique of this paradox of choice view here: http://www.reason.com/news/show/36172.html
I completely understand, having spent hours picking something out just to have nagging feeling that it wasn't the "best" or "right" one.
Apple actually sells a ton of computers, they're just good at categorizing them and organizing those categories so they make sense. I counted 13 doing a quick survey - prior to "customizing" them with additional options like memory.
@6 "I understand where he's coming from, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true. Too much choice can be overwhelming but, at the same time, too little is a bad thing too. I don't think the key is necessarily reducing/limiting your choice, so much as not worrying so much about whether or not you made the right one."
Exactly -- understanding when it is and is not important for *you* to limit choices is key. Swartz talks in his book about the difficulties of buying jeans at The Gap which he finds near overwhelming. I rarely spend more than a few minutes thinking about what clothes I'm going to buy/wear. If I do care, I will outsource that to someone else to whom this stuff actually makes sense (my wife).
On the other hand, my wife could care less as to which of the dozens of possible video cards are installed in her machine, whereas that is something I happen to know something about and care enough to actually pick a decent card at a decent price point.
Monopole @8: I see that you missed the point. Let's come back and take a look at it, hmm? You're talking about needing choices in photography as someone who, I'm guessing, is more than a casual photographer. We are talking about people who may, in fact, want "fixed focus cameras with no attachments", because they don't need to "o take a series of closely spaced photographs in differing wavelength ranges", but rather just want to capture the moment of Junior in his highchair with spaghetti sauce all over his face. If your Nikon Coolpix 27B/6 can do that without having to read a 50-page manual in microscopic type, well, fine then. Otherwise, they'll probably just use the camera phone.
People who design remote controls still don't get this. You still see remotes with dozens of buttons on them, and the designers probably know what each and every one of them does and makes a point of using them at home. Me, I just want to be able to pop out to the DVD menu when I get to a boring scene and to be able to back up and watch Kate Winslet take her clothes off in slo-mo.
@14 wrote:
"People who design remote controls still don't get this. You still see remotes with dozens of buttons on them, and the designers probably know what each and every one of them does and makes a point of using them at home. Me, I just want to be able to pop out to the DVD menu when I get to a boring scene and to be able to back up and watch Kate Winslet take her clothes off in slo-mo."
...and my grandmother only does crossword puzzles. Literally the only books she ever buys are books filled with crossword puzzles. So she doesn't understand why the local bookstore has to stock 10,000 titles when all *she* needs is crossword puzzles.
The example that really struck me was the 6.5 million stereo component combinations. The average person probably doesn't know a thing about any one of those components beyond its basic operation. At some point it must seem that if all the choices do basically the same thing then must all basically be the same, and one is as good as another. So they pick the one that comes in pink or whatever.
At least, I think this sort of reasoning is how people I know keep purchasing bullshit laptops from HP or Compaq.
This reminds me of the upper management of *some companies*, they have -and demand- the most powerful laptops and desktops but rarely or never use them to their fullest. No paradox for them tho, but for the rest.
You can also approach it a bit differently by prioritizing.
Do you NEED that or WANT it.
Will it add to you life or detract from it.
Will it simplify your life or add complexity.
Obviously, if the object is for your hobby or work, adding complexity may be fine as it allows greater control. If you specialize in graphics a complicated camera (and editing software and/or darkroom) can be completely justified.
If it's just for point and shoot photography you probably just want some zoom, good colour handling, good autofocus and 2-3 different settings for conditions. The machine may be doing a lot of complicated stuff, but that should be completely transparent to the user.
The same with most objects/devices. Some need the most complex options, most will only use the simple stuff. Most car owners will never feel the need to change the front/rear diff balance which is why most cars don't offer the option.
Some device manufacturers realize that their product features should revolve around the user.
User centric instead of device centric.
Apple has done some work in the field, pairing many (not all the) options with simple interfaces.
For the remote control issues mentioned above, notice the design of the apple remote. For most uses it's enough. If they were to go one step further and make a remote with an iPod interface they could probably nail the super simple and power user markets. I've seen a remote with dozens of un-navigable buttons that could do surprisingly little that the little white apple remote couldn't.
Complex interfaces are usually due to technological limitations at the time of design, due to lazy design or due to cost cutting.
(submenus are cheaper than hardware buttons)
I spend time on work, hobbies (most needing some tech) and family. If MANAGING my crap eats into any of those I'm doing something wrong
This issue is central to the world of digital technology and human-machine interfaces.
Apple got it right, although many would argue they stuck to the single mouse button for too long!
Only techno-geeks enjoy having as many buttons and menus and options as possible , most people using computers and other tech just want to get the job done without diversions.
It would be great to see creativity software such as Photoshop, Illustrator , Logic etc. , come with more options for customizing the interface by removing unwanted functions and menus, or even slimming down the app via a more modular design, reducing unnecesary drain on both human mind and CPU resources.
This would also make it easier for new users to learn the software. Most people really are intimidated by huge nested menus containing unfamiliar functions & don't want to have to pore through manuals or endless geeky wiki pages to find out how to get things done, most of us just want to use the stuff and learn in practice.
When there is feature bloat, it's just tiring and tends to reduce productivity by offering too many options and potential tangents.
The art of working with digital creative technology is in learning to narrow down the almost endless possibilities , so that the software becomes useable, just as traditional creative tools , such as paintbrushes, canvas, musical instruments etc. , with their inherent limitations could be worked with, without the interference of the creativity-killing "too many possibilities!".
A flute makes a flute sound, and the player just gets on with playing it, whereas a modern software-based synthesizer can make such a huge variety of sounds that most people waste time and energy tweaking parameters that have no importance whatsoever on the music to be played and the tweaking in fact is detrimental to just getting down to playing some good music.
And of course we know that the best websites are simple and uncluttered, and don't tire the user with endless lists of links and buttons. Info-overload is something all those who work in the digital domain ought to take very seriously.
Barry Schwartz's comment on too many options actually causing paralysis of the decision-making process matched my thoughts on the matter exactly.
(From Absolutely Fabulous)
I don't want more choices, I just want nicer things!
I absolutely believe this is true. I live in Denmark, where markets are very controlled and the variety of products is very limited. Last year, surveys found that Danes are the happiest people in the world. I think these two facts are very connected. The lack of options eases decision making when shopping--no matter what the product.
When I visited my family in Seattle last year, I found myself almost paralyzed by the options available when grocery shopping. There's something to be said for having 20 kinds of cereal to choose from instead of 200.
On the manufacturer and support sides, fewer models to sell translates on a simpler/cheaper stock parts model. Also makes more sense -although this is almost impossible to conceive on most companies- to focus on a few well designed articles than be host to a large amount of designers.
In light of this, how do we interpret the success of the firefox browser? Its flexibility and openness for add-ons (of which there are many options!) has got to be one of main reasons. Perhaps what people are after is simplicity out of the box with the potential for personal customization?
The only reason i prefer firefox is for the anonymisation and filtering plug-ins. Boingboing is so much better with Adblock!
Yeah, I already ran into and over this idiot. http://blog.russnelson.com/economics/barry-schwartz-master-chooser.html
This is not a new thought. IIRC Margaret Mead discusses it in a more general context in one of her books, I forget exactly where. Possibly at the end of "Coming of Age in Samoa".
Recently some psychologist reported in essence that money doesn't buy happiness. But I don't see a lot of people (certainly not the psychologist) voluntarily giving up their money to obtain this happiness. Funny how that works.
The Reason article posted above has exactly the right view.
From Fight Club:
The things you own end up owning you.
Freedom *to* reaches diminishing returns very quickly, but real freedom is freedom *from* and western civilization doesn't do that one quite as well.
I've been saying this for years. And as a tech, non-tech people thing I like things that are elaborate and complicated. Hell no. I don't want to think about many things. And for many things there's no reason to sweat the details.
@Jim Dandy: "Money may not buy happiness, but you can pick your own misery!" (Probably mangled) - Twain
I doubt the same person that's unhappy with money would be happier simply by having less of it. Who knows, though.