Podcast: Designing for the Paradox of Choice: An Interview with Barry Schwartz
August 28th, 2006
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
BSAL #4: Jared Spool’s Discussion with Barry Schwartz (18mb)
Full transcript available here.
In 2004, Barry Schwartz, a professor at Swarthmore College, wrote The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, a book that has quickly become a classic in the fields of economics, psychology, and now design. The premise of his work is simple: the more choices you give someone, the less likely they’ll want to make a choice, and they are less likely to be happy with the choices do they make. Limit the number of choices and you make people happier.
This line of thinking has huge implications on how we make design decisions. Where we traditionally wanted to give our users as many options as possible, Barry’s work on choice overload suggests we should consider doing otherwise: limiting the options and making choices for the users.
Recently, I had a chance to discuss these issues with Barry, in preparation for Barry’s keynote at the upcoming User Interface 11 conference. We recorded the discussion and have added it to the UIE Brain Sparks Audio Library for your listening pleasure.
August 28th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Your killing more workflow. Make this MP3 a part of your podcast feed so I can get it in iTunes.
August 28th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
[...] Read the transcript of my conversation with Barry. Listen to the podcast. [...]
August 28th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Wouldee: It’s part of the feed, but it seems iTunes caches the feed and takes a little while to update. (It hasn’t shown up in my iTunes yet either.)
September 2nd, 2006 at 9:19 pm
To share …
In a recent seminar in Shanghai, China – there was a suggestion that if there is more content and more choice on the Home Page – it gave users the impression that they could trust the web site. If there was less, it was not as reputable. Be interesting to research this further in Asia on the impacts of more vs less.
September 12th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
[...] Em uma entrevista com Barry Schwartz, autor do livro The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Jared Spool extraiu do autor uma solução para o problema do excesso de opções. [...]