Saturday, November 25, 2006 1:39 PM
by
dodyg
Featurities
"The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to
choose, and the unhappier they'll feel. See, for example, Barry
Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice.
Let me quote from the Publishers Weekly review: “Schwartz, drawing
extensively on his own work in the social sciences, shows that a
bewildering array of choices floods our exhausted brains, ultimately
restricting instead of freeing us. We normally assume in America that
more options ('easy fit' or 'relaxed fit'?) will make us happier, but
Schwartz shows the opposite is true, arguing that having all these
choices actually goes so far as to erode our psychological well-being.”
The fact that you have to choose between nine different ways of turning off your computer every time just on the start menu,
not to mention the choice of hitting the physical on/off button or
closing the laptop lid, produces just a little bit of unhappiness every
time." (Joel On Software)
More = Better is a common trap that development team find themselves in. Yeah,
we got more features dude.
More features = Higher Learning Curve = Higher Demand of Decision Making.
There is always a limitation in your software, regardless of how many variations of a feature you have implemented. So what you need to do is to make it simpler to use by
providing smaller set of choices that people need to make.
There's a Zen anecdote about this type of pattern. Two soldiers were running away from the battlefield. One ran for 10K and the other ran for 20K away. Who is more cowards?
They are both cowards, it doesn't matter that the latter ran further than the former.
The lesson of the story is this, once the essence of the action already decided, the optimization and variance don't really matter.