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Are More Choices Really Better?
A. Bosch writes to mention that Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek software has a commentary that examines the need for choices in software. From the article: "This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for 'Making Everybody Happy,' but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink." With software steadily becoming more sophisticated, are more choices really necessarily better?
Next question?
Seriously though, yes, more choices are always better. However, the additional choices don't have to be easy to get to.
For example, practically everything in Windows is configurable. However, in most cases the configuration is not exposed via a GUI. It's set to some default and you need to tweak the registry.
The same is true of Unix, of course; you often need to go to the config file directly to accomplish something, even where a GUI is available. You can accomplish all kinds of wacky things editing Xresources files.
But in both of these cases the full complexity is not directly exposed, so the user doesn't have to deal with it. On one hand this makes the software more complex and typically leads to bloat. On the other hand, this lets one tool accomplish many tasks without bothering people who don't use the functionality with its presence.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fewer choices are not necessarily better.
That said, let's take the average American. Their head would explode if you started explaining all they could do with Linux. They'd probably rather be trapped in the movie Deliverance than be faced with building and configuring Linux from scratch.
So don't ask me if more options are better because it depends on the case. I don't want my text editor to have all the bells and whistles known to man although I expect my process management suite that I use at my company to be able to interface with web services. Even though I prefer Emacs over MS Word, the next person my prefer them flipped.
To recap, ask your customer. Ask your end user. Ask your mother if she'd be able to user your software (provided it's meant for the general public). But the last people you should be asking are members of the Slashdot community.
My work here is dung.
...click...whirrr...whirrr..."I'm sure glad I don't have to solve all those hard problems like alphas and betas do..."
The problem - if any really exists - is not the number of choices, it is the manner in which the choices are presented to the user. ( For an example of good presentation, look at the average browser's bookmark function. You can have a well organized database of thousands of URLs, all of which are easy to find. Yet if they were one long list, it would be incomprehensible. )
The solution is not to obsess about the number of choices, but to think about the best way of presenting choices.
Seriously though, yes, more choices are always better
False. It has been shown in numerous studies that more choices often cause information overload, and result in poor choices being made. I will cite two examples:
1) Gov't Health Care - During the Clinton years, the idea of nationalized health care was bandied about. A majority of Americans agreed with the notion. How did the Republicans get it mired down and defeat. Besides Hillary leading the effort, the way it got shot down was brining three or four different models into the picture. Americans got overwhelmed, and opted for (f) None of the above.
2) 401(k) plans. Want to reduce your participation rates? Add more investment options. Sure, your sophisticated investors might like it, but Joe Sixpack gets eyes like saucers when he sees forty-five options that he must pick from. Study after study has shown more options = lower participation.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I'm still waiting for the computer with one button: "Do What I Mean"
Everything else is an abject design failure.
Software such as MS Word exemplifies the one-choice-for-all model of software. The result is bloatware when a single piece of software must support a diversity of users.
We all agree that Word is 90% bloatware, but we can't agree on which 10% of functionality to keep.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If you choose the "wrong" health plan, you may not be covered for a critical operation. Too bad. You die.
If you choose the wrong investment you may be broke when you retire. Too bad. You eat dog food and live in a box.
If you make the wrong choice (and the more choices there are, the more likely that you'll choose one that is not the "best").
If you choose the wrong pair of jeans, you take them back and get a different pair.
If you choose the wrong pizza place, you complain and get your money back and go to a different pizza place.
But none of that is applicable to TFA which just discusses the many ways you can tell your computer that you no longer need its services for the time being. Should it "sleep" or "hibernate" or "shutdown" or "lock"? Who cares as long as it is ready to operate when I come back?
I'm surprised that Joel does not reference one of his earlier rants about people wanting to feel in control. When the results of each decision is unknown then people start to feel like they are losing control and seek happier pastures elsewhere. When people fully understand the implications of a choice, they feel in control and are happier.
A choice between "sleep" and "hibernate" is great when the person making the choice knows what each option does. Most people do not care and do not want to care. This choice is useless to them and even lowers their sense of control over their computer and thus their satisfaction with it.
The trick is not taking away all the choices, like Joel is suggesting, but giving users control over what they want to control. Those that care can select their options, those that don't care get a fairly basic guess at what they want. Joel's guess for the power-off problem with laptops is fine but does not always work for me and probably lots of geeks. Hell, I want my laptop to suspend but keep the 3G network connection and there is no way to do that.
From the end user perspective, no. More choices are not better. The fewer the better. In fact, you will notice that an application that "just works" is highly sought after, instead of one that gives the user a never ending parade of choices.
From a middle tier perspective, more choices are good; Let me, the admin, make the choices for my end users. Give me all the options in the world. Just hide them from the end user so they aren't confused by them.
In a non-corporate environment, the vendors themselves have to play this role. But really, I don't see a problem with that.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
One of the most successful pieces of software (in my opinion) out there is the Eclipse project. It's all about "meta" choices--that is, the choice to have more choices. Out of the box Eclipse is great for your average Java developer. I recommend it to novice freshman developers. Now, if you want it to do more or integrate it with a server, that requires a plug-in. In fact, you can make it work for any language with the right plug-in. You don't get that functionality right off the bat but if you know what you're doing, you can plug it in. The problem is that a lot of development must be done to satisfy the unique choices your end user might have--that is, it requires a lot of support unless you let your community do it for you like Eclipse has.
My work here is dung.
Ironic, given that the screenshot he is showing has exactly two easily accessible options (lock and power down) and hides the rest away. Most users may or may not take a look at the other tucked away options in the drop-down/pop-up-box, and probably not worry about it again if they feel scared. So, for users who want less complexity there is already a very reduced choice of options. Is he then suggesting taking away options from power users? Really? B the same logic shouldn't notepad bet better than any IDE for doing programming, because it has less choice? And we probably want to do away with the command line for good, because there's clearly waaay to many options there. And the large majority of people already favoured the one-button mouse from apple very strongle, so much in fact, that apple never was asked for mice with more buttons, and most pc-users today buy and use one-button mouses.
Now, clearly Joel (and me here) have oversimplified the topic so much, that the dogma "less is more" has led to absurd suggestions. The key for successfully applying "less is more", is to properly look at the context. For a computer that is used as an internetkiosk, "log off" is the only button you need, there reducing choice is helpful. For a laptop user it would be extremely annoying not being able to choose sleep or hibernate, because it is going to waste energy and reduce the time I'll be able to work on it. Automatic powermanagement is not an option, because it can't read my mind. The computer will always be in hibernate when I just don't have the time to wait for it to power back on, or it will waste energy in sleep, when I know I'll be away.
I like to compare those options with my clothing options as a human. How would you like it, if somebody wanted to simplify things for you, and you only had two choices: naked (for sleeping), and fully dressed (for work). Want to take of the sweater because you have a shirt underneath? Tough luck, it was "optimized" away so you wouldn't have to worry about choices. Want to take off your shoes on the plane? Nope, either naked or fully dressed are your only options. Pretty silly - for most people, now of course there will be some people (those you are stressed out by clothing choices) that may feel a binary choice is progress, and good for them, yet that doesn't justify taking away the options from those who feel very comfortable partially taking some clothes off.
The funny thing is, that Joel even acknowledges tht there are good reasons why people who are comfortable with the choices, and why they are necessary for some, yet he somehow implicitly argues that those people are overridden by the ones that get scared by the options. He never explains why, though. Which IMHO makes his argument/position look very weak.
This is an unanswerable question, like "is more production really better?" Like every other rational question, it becomes a matter of marginal costs and benefits.
Additional options are always better until the marginal cost (in researching/comprehending the option) becomes greater than the marginal benefit provided by the option. Thus, options with low marginal benefits and/or high research costs are not better, and other options are. For example:
This is an example where more options are probably bad, because each additional option has huge research costs associated with them - that is, it takes a lot of effort to find out exactly why a person would prefer one or the other.Here, more options is probably still not better because while the research costs are low, the marginal benefit to being able to choose a slightly different shade of gray are so tiny as to be outweighed by the effort of having to even answer the question.Here is an example or more options are better. It's clear what the differences are, making research costs low, and the benefits to choosing the correct keyboard layout are huge.If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
He doesn't deny that different users are a good thing (that's why he includes the "change user" into the lock mode). However I'm not sure how he imagines this combination to work. I see two possibilities:
Either changing user from within lock first logs user 1 off, and then logs user 2 in. But then, what do you do if you definitively don't want toget logged out for some reason?
Or the second user gets logged in while the first user's programs still continue running. But then, without a logoff option user 1's programs might unnessecarily continue to run and eat ressources from user 2. And no, rebooting (or power off and on again) might not be an option because user 3 might still have programs running which he does not want to have terminated.
Of course, user 2 could just end all his programs before locking the screen, but he might not want to do all that work (and besides, there may be background processes running for him which he does not even know about).
The problem is that he has fallen for the much to common fallacy that the opposite of the wrong must be the right. To provide as many choices as possible is obviously wrong, therefore he thinks the opposite, that is to provide as little choice as possible, must be right.
What about the following rule?
The right amount of choice is best.
Of course that's a rule which isn't as easily followed as either "provide as much choice as possible" or "provide as little choice as possible", but doing things right is almost always a bit harder than just going to one extreme.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
- Sleep
- Restart
- Shutdown
- Log Out
That's apparently 5 less choices of action than Vista's. So go get a Mac and call it a day, Joel. Microsoft will never get a UI like Apple does. There's your choice.I think Joel and most or all of the responses here miss the real issue.
As a person, I don't want a ton of choices for different ways to do the same task. I want the system to work in the most intuitive way for me. If I never use hibernate, then I don't need to see it in a menu or on a button or whatever. I want the things I do most often to be easy to get to, the things I do less often to be easy to find, and the things I never do to be non-existent. And I don't want to have to go through some huge app like Word (or Emacs, for that matter) and customize every menu.
The problem is that you likely have a completely different set of desires and habits from me. So the choices in an app or Windows or Emacs are not to allow a user to do something in multiple different ways, they're to allow multiple different users to choose the one way they like to do it.
I was about to say that a good solution might be an app that "learns" my preferences and eliminates what I don't need, but then I remembered that this has been done to some extent in Windows and/or Office (sorry, I don't use Windows all that often to remember exactly). I find that I really hate that little arrow there saying, "hey, I've got a secret that I'm not showing you".
In the end, I think most users (the set of users that are not highly technically savvy) just want simple apps that do what they need them to do without having to think too much. On that I agree with Joel.
The whole point of software is to automate tedious things, so if choice becomes tedious we should really try to automate that as well. Joel's approach is entirely correct: figure out what your users are trying to do, and try to offer options which relate to them. Exporting all functionality and leaving the user to figure out what all the options mean exemplifies design failure. It is essentially "no design". Slightly better is to provide sensible defaults, but the best designs focus on things the user thinks a computer ought to do and things the user wants to do (disregarding, sometimes, what the computer really does do). The whole situation reminds me of command line interfaces, where the user had to memorize a bunch of commands and options and put them all together in order to accomplish a goal. We have somehow recreated that mess in graphical form, with the added inefficiencies of navigating menus using a mouse. It's almost like a cruel joke has been played on the public. Just when computers look like they might become simple enough for anyone to use and are widely adopted - BAM! Take that suckers! Whenever this topic comes up I think of my Grandma. She is a smart lady and she uses computers, but she is also old. She has been around for a while, and she's not about to tolerate any more nonsense. Contrary to the stereotype she is not intimidated by technology, but she avoids a lot of it because her impression is that most of this stuff is designed by idiots who don't have a clue what they are doing. I hate to say it, but she's right. I think that when we talk about software that grandmas can use, it should be in this sense. Old people are not going to put up with this crazy crap the way younger people seem to do. It has to make sense, and it has to work.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
In the color example that you gave, consider the relevance of precise color selection for company branding. My company spent $200,000 two years ago to create a color scheme to be used for all company publications (including software products). This was after spending even more money assessing the potential impact of the change (which was determined to be significant). A similar importance exists in many other industries such as interior design (wallpaper, carpet, etc.).
My point being, more choice is always best. The simple act of you trying to impose a judgement on which categories of choice are valuable is a bad thing because, depending on your ability to effect what is produced, you could potentially eliminate choices of great value to others, based on your own needs and experience. This is why more choice is always better.
This is why a free system is ultimately superior to a restricted one, no matter how well thought out. A free system is one of constant choice motivated by the immediate needs of the situation. A restricted system, no matter how wisely designed, immediately creates the possibility of no longer matching the current situation and is thus immediately less inefficient than a free system. Children rebel, empires fall.
Look at the analogs in the United States. Increasing restrictions on freedom. Ever-growing quantities of legislation (there is a reason we call convoluted and elaborate creations "Byzantine"--that empire collapsed on itself). Simultaneously, the world is moving faster and faster. When knights faced each other with melee weapons (slow), knights ruled the day. When the bow (fast) was created, knights knew fear. When the gun (faster) was created, knights were no more. The weight of their arms became a fatal liability because it limited their choices (mobility).
So there are several seemingly unrelated examples, but they all have the same message. Choice wins. Freedom wins. You can never have too much choice, so long as there is no closure (e.g. "You can choose anything, but that."). Last example: the apple in the Garden of Eden. Why was that choice present? Freedom to choose is the selective process that drives the entire Universe, a Universe of unlimited choices.
Ok, I sort of went off there. I'll come back to Earth shortly. Phew.
I think that the wrong conclusion is being drawn from the cited example.
This holds true for the US (as you pointed out), but try the same test in (say) the UK, & you'll find that the vast majority of people are likely to prefer a manual transmission, whatever their level of techie-ness. This is simply because it's what most UK drivers are used to, so I think that the cited straw poll really just shows that users tend to go with whatever they're already familiar with. This also explains why as many as 50% of the members in the US GUI class cited still vote for an automatic, despite the perceived advantage in vehicle control of a manual that the experimenter suggests should appeal to techies.
This is clearly true in software too, as indicated by the enduring majority of Windows desktop machines over other available user-friendly interfaces such as those offered by (e.g.) Ubuntu or Mac OS X.
Note that I never use Windows myself, so please don't flame me as an advocate of Microsoft. And I'm not arguing with the "soft tech" approach to hiding power-user complexity per se, I just think that the given example is misleading.
he points out that the public as a whole (at least in the U.S.) prefers automatics to standards by a margin of at least 9:1.
And here in the UK, I don't think I've ever been in an automatic, nor heard of anyone who owns one; manual vehicles are by far the most common. In fact, I don't think you can even buy automatics, except by special order.
I really don't think that manual vs automatic is a matter of preference, so much as it is a matter of what you're used to and what's available.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The US is not the whole world. Here in New Zealand there are about as many manual transmission cars as automatics, and the only reason that there are so many automatics (there weren't in the quite recent past) is that about 50% of newly registered cars are in fact used cars from Japan (becuase they are *cheap*), which are almost invariably automatic.
Automatics have an advantage in places where you get stuck in stop/start traffic jams. Japan and the cities in the USA are like that. NZ isn't. Automatics have definite disadvantages on hilly or twisty roads, especially with smaller or more highly-tuned engines. NZ is like that. The USA mostly isn't. And most cars in NZ are 2000cc or less.
After he gets the count of hands and shows that it's about half of the audience, he points out that the public as a whole (at least in the U.S.) prefers automatics to standards by a margin of at least 9:1.
At least, indeed, you mentioned "here in the US", as I'm sure that in most of Europe, about 90% of people would raise their hands when you asked them the same question, and also about 90% (if not actually 95% or more) do indeed drive cars with manual transmission.
I don't know exactly why - are manual cars still in fact more fuel efficient? If so that could be the reason (remember that fuel is way more expensive here because of additional taxes, it's like 3x as expensive). I think many cars with automatic transmission here are driven by people with some kind of disability (e.g. can use only 1 leg or 1 arm).
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'