The Paradox of Choice

July 13th, 2006

I don’t like to just link to stuff, but outsourcing choice at 37 signals is worth linking to. The post talks about designing interfaces with fewer choices. Really, the interesting thing here is Barry Schwartz and his book, The paradox of Choice. The paradox of choice being that having more choices makes you unhappy. Well, there is more to it than that. The New Yorker has a good summary of the book.

I watched a bunch of google tech talk presentations a few months ago. By far the best presentation was Barry Schwartz explaining The paradox of Choice. This video is worth watching.

I think these are important ideas in the quest for extreme simplicity.

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6 Responses to “The Paradox of Choice”

  1. PHP as a Deployment Platform - Professional PHP says:
    11/4/2006 at 1:38 pm

    [...] Which configuration options to target? There was some talk recently on the PHP internals list about creating a recommended .ini profile for development environments and one for production environments. I think this is a great idea. Hopefully, then folks installing PHP can choose a profile instead of setting individual .ini options. Perhaps this would help reign in some variability and reduce some Paradox of choice style unhappiness. [...]

  2. bloggzee » PHP as a Deployment Platform says:
    8/15/2007 at 6:41 pm

    [...] setting individual .ini options. Perhaps this would help reign in some variability and reduce some Paradox of choice style [...]

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