Professional PHP » decision-making http://www.procata.com/blog PHP Programming, Web Development, PHP Advocacy and PHP Best Practices. Fri, 10 Dec 2010 17:23:30 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 The Paradox of Choice http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2006/07/13/the-paradox-of-choice/ http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2006/07/13/the-paradox-of-choice/#comments Fri, 14 Jul 2006 05:23:10 +0000 Jeff http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2006/07/13/the-paradox-of-choice/ 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.

]]> http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2006/07/13/the-paradox-of-choice/feed/ 6 Extreme Simplicity http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2006/03/01/extreme-simplicity/ http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2006/03/01/extreme-simplicity/#comments Thu, 02 Mar 2006 03:52:22 +0000 Jeff http://www.procata.com/blog/?p=175 Could this be the manifesto of “Extreme Simplicity?”

10 fundamental rules for the age of user experience technology:

  1. More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
  2. You can’t make things easier by adding to them.
  3. Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
  4. Style matters
  5. Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
  6. Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
  7. Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use
  8. Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
  9. Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
  10. Less is difficult, that’s why less is more

Consumer devices or frameworks, we are a product of our times.

Watch and contemplate.

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