The Paradox of Choice

sproketboy writes "Psychology professor Barry Schwartz has written a book which is a must read by those wanting to get Linux on the Desktop. Dr. Schwartz examines the problem of too much choice in our society. Maybe Microsoft has it right after all? Here's a video interview with Dr. Schwartz, a review of the book from the New Yorker and more info from PBS." Of course, the choice issue applies to far more than desktop computers, but is still instructive in that area. Thanks to Stefan Hudson for a SciAm story that has more information.

Comments

Freedom of Choice

[The Queen]

is what you got...

Freedom From Choice
Is what you want.

(Are we not men?)

Re:Freedom of Choice

[bobcat7677]

There are alot of people that seem to think that choice = freedom. While this is true at some levels, there are deeper issues to be considered. For an American example being that America was founded on the idea of freedom: Is a choice between Busy Kerry Nader really freedom? Sure you have a choice but you are limited to only 3 options. Is that really pure freedom or just a little bit of choice allowed you by a governmental system so you feel like you have freedom.

Going back to the current topic however, it seems like everyone is making this desktop choice issue way too political IMHO. It should be about what the needs are of the users. Isn't that what we as technology professionals are supposed to look to? (tech hippocratic oath if you will?) For some users, we want to limit their options because they don't have the knowledge/experience/brain capacity? to choose the correct option for what they are trying to do. Thank you M$ for aknowledging that. However, there are increasingly more people who DO have the knowledge/experience/... (especially with a whole generation of kids being brought up to use this stuff) that need to have the choices. If the future inventors, artists, and innovators have their tools dictated to them in nice neat little "luser" packages, then how much will that limit their ability to invent, create, and innovate? And how much will the corporation that controls all the tools become in control of the society in dictating who has the tools to do things and who doesn't. [Maybe a caste system of technology dictated by M$ on the horizon?]
-- my random thoughts

Re:Freedom of Choice

[SillyNickName4me]

It is limited freedom.

When the USA was founded, freedom was an important argument, but it should be seen in the settings of the late 18th century.

I have been reading a lot about the early days of the USA and the following is my recolelction of what I read about the discussions regarding the exact form of government that the USA got at the time.

In that time, there has been a lot of discussion in the USA and France about the different models of government without monarch.

There is a choice between a few systems there, and 2 of them were discussed a lot in detail:
- The republic of Sparta
- The democracy of Athens.

What they ended with is somethign that looks a lot more like the republic of Sparta then the democracy of Athens.

Bottomline, an elite is in charge of the country, however, this elte is elected.

This means that people cannot make direct choices in matters that concern the country as a whole, but they can appoint those who can make those choices.

At the time, people were afraid that the purely democratic way would result in chaos and unlimited individualism. The Spartan system didn't provide for the freedom that people demanded and was too much of a tirany.

In the end, it did end up folowing the Spartan model, but with an elected elite.

What this tells me is that the founders were actually looking for a way to limit individualism at least to the point where peopel would not act against the common good, and in the hope that peopel would contribute to the common good, while at the same time trying to maintain as much freedom as possible.

I believe it is a bit simplistic to say that Freedom is THE thing the USA was founded on, it was an important aspect, but in the end, balance to get a state that worked for as big a part of its citizens as possible, and finding the right balance between individualism and the common good were at least as important if not more important.

It seems to me that the way political parties function in the USA is pretty much a continuation of English tradition. A rather substantial part of the representative democracies in the world have more then 2 major parties, and do indeed need coalition governments. Few of those have the problems that we have seen for decades in Italy where a government wouldn't last more then a few months, in fact, Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium are 3 examples of countries with very stable governments while having many political parties.

A basicly 2 party system (with all respect for the man, I'll skip Nadar, untill some major change happens to how the US population percieves politics, I am afraid he has little chance whatsoever) makes life easy.

Political views can be put into a black/white perspective, and there is no need for cooperation since one side will end up beign in power while the other side will have to wait and watch untill the next elections (yeah yeah, I know it is a bit more complex then that due to the way the senate and congress work in the USA where you can have a republican president with a democratic congress for example).

The black/white choice makes it easy because people don't have to think too much about things of which they often don't see the direct relation to their daily life.

Most people want simple choices if any at all for things that they are not really interested in but want huge variety of choice once they are interested.

Three Links?!

[IronTek]

This would have been an informed post, but there was a link to a video of the guy discussing the paradox of choice, a link to the article about the book, and a link to an interview with the guy in the video who wrote the book that the article was about... ...so I couldn't decide.

So why not do both?

[Penguinisto]

Last Monday, Miguel de Icaza (at Novell's BRainshare here in Salt Lake City) mentioned Novell's push for the Linux desktop, and covered a lot of the same ground, but he presented it quite intelligently...

You can have a simple desktop that Joe Sixpack can play with, and at the same time set up a dialogue that allows the tweaker in some of us to have free reign over what each little widget and bit of desktop does.

I just don't get why it has to be such an "either or" choice here...

annoying...

[spangineer]

Tons of choices can be annoying - going to a restaurant and being forced to select from a huge list of foods can be overwhelming. Usually, all I end up doing is finding one thing I like and then ordering that all the time, without checking out other stuff. It's too much of a hassle to try out every choice that exists in the world.

Then again, if we didn't have as many choices, I might not be able to find one thing I like in the first place, and thus probably wouldn't go back to eat there - I'll choose to go somewhere else.

But if that choice was taken away, I'd have to eat something I didn't particularly like, which never killed anyone.

Morale of the story? Having too many choices is the real reason I'm a picky eater.

Apple saw this problem during the 90s

[toupsie]

Apple used to have a massive product line with dizzying list of model numbers. Not only did it confuse customers but it also brought down quality and delayed shipping of many of the models. Now you can just buy a notebook (iBook and PowerBook) and a desktop (eMac, iMac & PowerMac) from Apple. Sure you can supe up the basic model they sell but you are still buying a standardized item.

Re:Apple saw this problem during the 90s

[glassware]

On the other hand, Apple's software philosophy is to have only one way to do something, and to have that work well and be obvious. Check out the Macintosh Human Interface Design documents.

Even more importantly, this philosophy extended to the Macintosh API. Even Microsoft moved in this direction. Bill Gates once said, "Why should everyone in the world have to write a File-Open dialog?" The Microsoft Common Controls API was the best thing that happened to Win16 programmers back in the early '90s.

Yet, after a few years, Microsoft started putting together OLE, DDE, ActiveX, and a bunch more stuff - there were tons of choices. Consider Microsoft's media player: there was a text-based API, a procedure call API, and an object oriented API. Microsoft programming has been getting harder, thus they introduce .NET and standardize everything again.

I'm all for choice when it works. For example, KDE offers you tons of choices; by default there's this multiple-virtual-desktop thing with all sorts of options and shortcut keys and soforth. But the one choice I want - the ability to stop files and folders on my local harddrive from acting like hyperlinks - isn't available. I suppose that, given a few months of practice, I could get used to treating my hard drive like a website, but it isn't working out for me at the moment.

I dunno if I have a real point here. But I think Extreme Programming has at least one useful idea: customer stories. Try writing down all the things a user wants to do - "Map a Network Drive", "Change double-click behavior", "Organize My Documents" - and then put together an obvious way for the user to do it, or (if it's too hard to make it obvious) at least a straightforward help page that explains the task.

Am I rambling? Feel free to call me redundant.

Re:Sounds like Commie Propaganda

[Russ Nelson]

It's not about the number of choices. It's about the quality of them. Even the poorest schmuck has plenty of choices. It's just that they all suck.
-russ

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

The observations are a direct consequence of a well known usability heuristic called Hick's Law. Hick's Law states (roughly) that the time an individual requires to make a decision increases with the number of alternatives available.

Re:Too many choices?? Hardly

[NineNine]

But the thing is that with Linux, you can always back out to Windows, which in this day and age, is just a fine choice. So if I'm gonna install Linux, then be presented with 13 web browsers, 3 desktops, and 5 office suites, I'm much more likely to throw up my hands and say "fuck it" and re-install windows, then to try to deciper everything in Linux. Each distro should just pick out the best, and leave it at that. Not only do I not need a dozen web browsers, I don't *want* a dozen web browsers. This makes total sense.

I run a retail store. I have a large number of products that cover one particular need. Without help, customers just get overwhelmed and leave. We have to ask them what they need, and help them make a decision. Same thing with Linux, except that there's no help. You install a distro, get 1000's of programs, 95% which are useless to the user, and they get overwhelmed and bail.

Unless some expertise is offered (ie: each distro picks ONE office suite, ONE browser, ONE desktop, etc.), it's just too much to deal with, and completely unnecessary.

Choice is good... for now

[ajs]

Choice is a fine thing for now. Most of the world is still being introduced to desktop computing. It is not yet time to select the best technologies for any given application because we don't understand the application well enough yet.

Even something as "basic" as word processing has changed radically in the last 10 years as a wider variety of people have gained access to computers. The "outliers" in the sample set have, in some cases, become the majority of users.

Open source OSes are especially subject to this. Our systems are designed by those who have a combination of real-world-need and ability to implement. As time goes on that will be a broader and broader segment, and others will be brought in to implement for those who have the need, but not the ability (certainly already happened in some areas).

Give computing 20 or so more years to find its feet and it will be time to make hard decisions, but for now I think choice is a good thing.

Now, moving on to the officeplace (which is where most people think of desktop computing in terms of adoption strategies), I think it's key that OS vendors such as Red Hat, Mandrakesoft, SuSE/Novell and others produce a desktop with clear defaults and clear ways for admins to limit choices. This is important for large scale systems admin where you are maintaining 2,000 systems on people's desks. You need some uniformity in order to scale that support reasonably. This does NOT meant that choice should not be available, but that it should be available to the admins who install the systems and the system should behave well once those choices are made.

I think Red Hat and Mandrake do a decent job here. I'm not as familliar with SuSE, so I can't say. But, that is clearly one of the jobs of a vendor: to establish best practices and ease compatibility.

Re:Too much choice?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no... Macs get you laid. With Microsoft, you're simply fucked.

Choices != decisions

[heironymouscoward]

It's a common mistake to confuse choices with decisions. Decisions are what confuse and annoy people, not choices.

Some simple illustrations of this. Choice: "these are the desktop themes you can play with". Decision: "please choose a desktop theme to continue installation.

Choice: "tired of your wife? Here are ten more girls to choose from." Decision: "you gonna marry me or what?!"

Choice: "choose from fifty different fabric colors for your car interior". Decision: "what color interior do you want your next subway car to have?"

Basically a good designer maximises choice but minimizes the decisions needed to get started.

I believe the article has made the error of confusing the two.

HP Cafeteria

[nacturation]

I take it you've never eaten at the HP cafe?

Lunch, the HP Way

by Stephen Harrison and Noel Magee

This is the story of a different kind. No melting CPU's, no screaming disc drives, just the kind of psychological torture that scars a man for life.

I had a 9:00 meeting with my sales rep. I needed to buy an entire new series 70, the works. He said it'd take about an hour. Three hours later, we'd barely got the datacomm hardware down on paper, so he invited me downstairs for lunch.

This was my first experience in an HP cafeteria. Above the service counter was a menu which began...

MMU's (Main Menu Units)

0001A Burger. Includes sesame-seed bun.
Must order comdiments 00110A separately
001 Deletes seeds.
002 Expands burger to two patties.

00020A Double cheeseburger, preconfigured. Includes cheese,
bun and condiments.
001 Add-on bacon.
002 Delete second patty.
003 Replaces second patty with extra cheese.

00021A Burger Upgrade to Double Cheeseburger
001 From Single Burger.
002 From Double Burger.
003 Return credit for bun.

00220A Burger Bundle. Includes 00010A, 00210A and 00310A
001 Substitute root beer 00311A for cola 00310A.

My eyes glazed over. I asked for a burger and a root beer. The waitress looked at me like I was an alien.

"How would you like to order that, sir?"

"Quickly, if possible. Can't I just order a sandwich and a drink?"

"No sir. All our service is menu driven. Now what would you like?"

I scanned the menu. "How big is the 00010 burger?"

"The patty is rated at eight bites."

"Well, how about the rest of it?"

"I dont have the specs on that, sir, but I think it's a bit more."

"Eight bites is too small. Give me the Double Burger Upgrade."

My sales rep interrupted. "No, you want the Single Burger option 002 'expands burger to two patties'. The double burger upgrade would give you two burgers.

"But you could get return credit on the extra bun," the waitress chimed in, trying to be helpful, "although it isn't documented."

I looked around to see if anybody was staring at me. There was a couple in line behind us. I recognized one of them, a guy who merely mowed me down in the parking lot with his cherry-red '62 Vette. He was talking to some woman who was waving her arms around and looking very excited.

"What if... we marketed the bacon cheeseburger with the vegetable option and without the burger and cheese? It'd be a BLT!"

The woman charged off in the direction of the telephone, running steeplechases over tables and chairs. My waitress tried to get my attention again. "Have you decided, sir?"

"Yeah, give me the double burger- excuse me, I mean the 00020A with the option 001. I want everything on it." She put me down for the Condiment Expansion Kit, which included mayonnaise, mustard and pickles with a option to substitute relish.

"Ketchup." I hated to ask. "I want ketchup on that, too."

"That's not a condiment, sir, it's a Tomato Product." My sales rep butted in again. "That's not a supported configuration."

"What now?" I kept my voice steady.

"Too juicy. The bun can't handle it."

"Look. Forget the ketchup, just put some lettuce and tomatoes on it."

The waitress backed away from the counter. "I'm sorry, sir, but that's not supported either, the bun can take it but the burger won't fit in the box. The sales rep defended himself. "Just not at first release." "It is being beta-tested, sir."

I checked the overhead screen. Fries, number 000210A, option 110. French followed by option 120, English. "What the hell are English Fries?" I turned to the sales rep. "Chips they call them. We sell a lot of them."

I gave up. "OK, OK just give me a plain vanilla Burger Bundle." The confused the waitress profoundly. "Sir, Vanilla as an option is configured

Your problem

[bonch]

I have no sympathy for people who have so many good choices that they have trouble choosing just one. None.

Wow. You're so heroic.

Your problem is that you think NORMAL people--i.e., people who don't visit Slashdot 10+ times a day and download the latest point release of something called "GNOME"--have the time, energy, and patience to learn which of their 8 text editors is the best. To them, the whole idea is ridiculous, and they'll ask you, "why don't they just make one good one?"

Are you going to whine at them how you have no sympathy for people who blah blah blah something about poor people in India blah blah blah, or are you just going to nod and agree like any sane person would?

The day anti-social, non-approachable nerds like you (this is not a troll but an accurate description of the mindset) stop controlling the direction of the Linux desktop community is the day it finally starts gaining real momentum outside of its current niche position.

Re:Too many choices?? Hardly

[The Spoonman]

Consider: how many manufacturers and models of cars do we have? Consumer electronics? Colours and styles of paint?

How many models of cars that do things differently from every other model of car? If I buy a Ford, I don't need to take training because my last car was a Pontiac. Everything works the same. Sure, the placement of the A/C or cruise controls are a little different, but the steering wheel isn't square and in the trunk. The basics of "a car" does not change: it has four wheels, (in the States) a steering wheel on the left front side, two-three pedals, etc. Hell, even the order of the gears on an automatic are the same (P R N D 1 2 3).

Contrast that with Linux distros where some applications are present, and some are not. Some applications are placed here, and some are placed there. Some use this window manager, some use this one. Some keybindings are like this, some are like that. Some will work with hardware better than others. Some have this, some have that. Hell, I've tried 2-3 distros in the last few months, and only one that I remember contained a GUI util to change the screen resolution (an important util for noobs as most distros set your damn resolution to the absolute highest it will go, regardless of how you want it or not!)

I can climb into any car, start it up and drive it. Change your Linux distro, or just upgrade in some cases, and you spend hours just trying to figure out where everything is. THIS is why Windows is winning the desktop day in and day out. It has nothing to do with monopolies or political bullying. It never ceases to amaze me that the Linux community will stomp and scream like small children about anything that violates an open standard in any way, shape, or form, but outright REFUSES to create a single, standard, default desktop that is consistent across all distros. There's nothing stopping you or anyone else from changing it later, but start with SOMETHING.

Give 'em four tires and a steering wheel, if they want a Cartman antenna topper or a Jason Mewes window sticker, they can add it themselves. And, I know, there's gonna be tons of flames on this post..."Don't tell me what I can and can't run on my desktop!" "Who gives you the right to decide what's included in my distro?" For those contemplating such flames...get a clue. No one is suggesting locking anyone into a "one size fits all soylent world", idiot. They're suggesting giving a consistent base to build on.