Barry Schwartz gave a talk to Google employees called "The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less", which is also the name of a book he authored. In the speech, he argues that choice is not always a good thing. This is a position I've known and agreed with, but haven't been able to articulate as well as he has. And listening to his speech has deepened my understanding of the issues, and gave a new perspective.

I'm going to clarify something right away, but I suspect it won't do any good, and I'll be receiving hate mail from Linux zealots, and other people who take the "choice is good" assumption too far: Schartz is not saying that choice is always bad. He is saying choice is not always good. If you are having problems distinguishing between these two assertions, then you are probably (incorrectly) assuming that the relationship between amount of choice and goodness is monotonic. That is, if 4 choices is better than 2, then clearly a billion choices is better than 4, via induction. Schartz argues (successfully, in my opinion) that this is simply false. 4 choices may be better than 2, and maybe 6 is better than 4, but there exists a certain point after which the more choices you introduce, the worst off the choosers are.

One of the empirical data he cites to support his cause is the behaviour of reward selection. People were asked to complete a survey, and as a reward, were offered $2 or a good quality pen. Most people opted for the pen. Later on, the same survey was carried out with a different set of participants, and now they were offered $2, a good quality pen, or two cheaper pen. Now, people tended to choose the $2. When there was only one choice in pens, the value of that good quality pen was perceived to be higher than the value of $2. When there were more than once choice in pen, the perceived quality of the pen was lower than the value of $2. That is, by introducing more choices in pens, you actually lowered the perceived values of the pens.

He cites several other examples which support the idea that more choices introduces paralysis (the chooser chooses to not do anything, rather than choose a sub-optimal choice, nevermind that not choosing anything is often the worst of all possible choices), that more choices decreases satisfaction, happiness, etc. and increases stress, regret, etc.. I could repeat them all, but it'd probably be easier for both of us if you just go watch the video.

Unfortunately, Schartz doesn't spell out for us exactly what this means for software design (and in particular, user interface design), though he explicitly does apologize that this is not his field of expertise, and feel it'd only be insulting for him to tell us how to do our job.