How often have you gone to the store for a quick purchase that ends up taking hours due to so many options? Finally a book which speaks to something that seems to be so true: More options – an excess of choice – is not always a good thing! Everything was easier back when we had fewer things to choose from. The author, Barry Schwartz, speaks about the over-abundance of choice in Schwartz’s talk at Google or in this shorter TED Talk.

The gist of the message is this: We have always been under the impression that it is better to have more choice since it gives us more freedom, which in turn gives us more happiness. In reality, choices tend to inundate us with so much information that it can be overwhelming and detrimental.

“There’s no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.” Some of the examples he gives are:

1. Shopping: There are at least 75 bottles of salad dressing in the supermarket at a given moment. Do we really need so many?

2. Healthcare: Every ailment now has multiple numbers of treatments. Drugs are now being marketed directly to us because we are now consumers of our own healthcare.

3. To Work or Not to Work: Modern technologies (laptops, PDA’s, blackberries) allow us to work at anytime, anywhere. This causes us to always have to choose whether or not to work.

Obviously, choice is a wonderful thing. But at a certain point choice can actually be a hindrance. People agree that there are too many choices in every category of consumer good – from clothes to washing machines. According to Schwartz, “People have more decisions to make than it is worth their time and trouble to be making.”

Too much choice can have detrimental effects:

• Choice can lead to paralysis – too many choices cause you to actually choose NONE!
• Overabundance of choice can cause you to make the wrong decisions since you end up selecting based upon one parameter (i.e. looks) over a more meaningful parameter (i.e., quality). How many of us have selected a sub-par bottle of wine due to its snazzy label?
• Choice can lead to regret. If something isn’t perfect, it is easy to imagine that an alternative would have been better. Regret reduces the satisfaction you get from good choices. Anticipated regret prevents you from making choices at all – you are so sure you are going to make the wrong choice that you don’t make any choice.
• We evaluate our experiences based upon what we expect them to be. More options raises our expectations – causing us to expect perfection. These high expectations ultimately lead us to less satisfaction with results, even if they are good results.
• The longer we mull over a decision, the more we comprehend the pros and cons to every option. This knowledge makes us more likely to suffer from our choice after it has been made.

So what does this mean for creators of interactive products? We should always be mindful of the perils of abundance. Interaction designers are essentially “choice architects” since we provide users options to navigate to different places and execute various actions. Therefore, we should always keep in mind that choices can have a negative effect on our users. Within reason, we should try to anticipate what is best for the user rather than inundate them with options. Since choice can cause paralysis leading users to actually choose nothing, we should organize options so that if users do nothing, they actually get what is in their best interest.