More is Less - Interesting thought from Joel Spolsky

Does having more options necessarily make you feel better? Does giving your users multiple ways to do the same thing make them feel any happier or smarter?

Joel Spolsky takes a look at the newly launched Windows Vista and concludes that having to choose between a multitude of options actually makes the user confused and unhappy.

Interesting read. Few excerpts below.

Choices = Headaches

This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Tuesday, November 21, 2006

I'm sure there's a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista, but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I'm guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I'm not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

On many laptops, there are also four FN+Key combinations to power off, hibernate, sleep, etc. That brings us up to 13 choices, and, oh, yeah, there's an on-off button, 14, and you can close the lid, 15. A total of fifteen different ways to shut down a laptop that you're expected to choose from.

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.

Can anything be done? It must be possible. iPods don't even have an on/off switch. Here are some ideas.

Read full article here