Comments on The Line Between Clarity and Chaos

CB Whittemore — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:50 GMT

Wonderful interview, Liz! And, great food for thought. I’ve posted about your interview at http://flooringtheconsumer.blogspot.com.

steven streight — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:47 GMT

I also take exception with the very dangerous wording of “democratic to a fault” which strongly implies a distrust of “too much” democracy, like “too much” civil rights for blacks, or “too much human rights”, “too much education”, “too much happiness”, or “too much political freedom”.

How is something taken “to a fault”? Is the fault pre-arranged, pre-existing? Or is the fault an outstreaming of a contamination inherent in a corrupt system? Is democracy such a system?

What does it mean to be distant from a fault, and is there safety in distance? If something can be taken “to a fault”, is there not the assumption on the part of the author that that democracy is already “faulty”, since it was vulnerable, perhaps secretly wishing, for this fault to come along and seduce it?

steven streight — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:47 GMT

I don’t see “information overload” as any problem whatsoever. There are filters that we use mentally, individually, called web savvy. Thinking and judging is good for the mind and society. Why should information always be easy, simple, and limited?

Information wants to be, and always already is, infinite. There is some increase in information, but also increase in hunger for information, and increase in new ways of distributing and accessing information.

To bewail the abundance of content, to regret the influx of garbage, is not the best use of our time and effort. All communication channels, including fully present speech, is loaded with noise. Not just blogs and YouTube.

Ido Dan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:47 GMT

What an awesome interview – well done.

This subject has been at the top of my list for the past year, and I am glad B&A touches it as well.

Another piece of fantastic dive into this area is given by Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard. He gave an impressive talk titled “Persuing Happiness” about human happiness and how it is related to the amount of options we’re presented with. Lemme know what you guys think!

http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=d_gilb…

-Ido.

Michael Beavers — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:47 GMT

Very cool article, Liz. What captivated me was the concept that overburdening people with choices can actually limit decision-making.

At my agency, we operate in part on an experience theory called “directed choice”. Oversimplified, directed choice is a method of presenting brand benefits that takes some liberties with assumptive user tasks—much like a salesperson would engage a prospect.

The design paradox is that we intentionally limit the choices users can take, discard the traffic that isn’t really interested at that moment (or better yet keep them around to draw into a marketing database, viral tools) and then move warm prospects into buying or communicating with a real person. One of the more effective examples of this is freedomoftheseas.com.

This type of high-bandwidth interaction certainly does not work for all users, information-gathering, task scenarios, or decision-making styles, but limiting choices and encouraging exploration can often be highly effective for branding and selling interactions.

Keying off of Jonathan’s comments: one thing I would LOVE to try is some kind of combination of rich media directed choice and collaborative filtering like Amazon or Netflix. How cool would that be?

Adrian Chong — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:47 GMT

Great interview! Schwartz’s insight definitely help inform some of the design decisions we make but I have to agree with Jonathan on the comments Schwartz was making about gatekeepers. Depending on the gatekeeper’s agenda, information can be as erroneous or misleading as having an abundance of choice.

Schwartz mentioned his preference for a range of editors who help him filter what he reads. As Jonathan already alluded, this happens constantly and in more interesting ways on the web. Implicit actions like collaborating filtering or explicit actions such as voting can act as editors in their own rite. Regardless, the book definitely helps our case against “features for the sake of having features”.

Jonathan Baker-Bates — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:47 GMT

Thanks for this interview, and props to Liz for being able to collar the man for B&A.

I won’t pretend to know more than Shwartz on his subject, but I think his comments on the question of the Internet being “democratic to a fault” and the importance of gatekeepers and editorial are somewhat beyond his ambit, so I feel justified in being able to disagree with them. There is not a binary choice between trusting a single gatekeeper, editor or “brand,” and drinking from a fire hose. Collaborative filtering can be just as effective (and transparent in operation) as centralised filtering, and methods of calibrating trust and editorial strength dependent on perceived importance (to the individual consumer of that information) can and are becoming quite sophisticated. I find that people like Shwartz often don’t seem to understand networks and technology properly because they choose to see them in terms of their observation of centralised or linear systems (like publishing) or established models like classical economics. The situation here is different, and his mistrust of technology does him no favours in that respect.

On a minor point, I’m also adding this to my collection of quotes from people who think that Google is the last search engine we will ever have.

Jeff Parks — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:46 GMT

A great interview, Liz! I have referred to Dr. Schwartz’s work on a couple of Podcasts I’ve completed to date and his book on the paradox of choice.

Another interesting book, related to these ideas is “Enough – Staying Human in an Engineered Age” by Bill McKibben. As he states – “We need to do an unlikely thing; we need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough. Not in every detail; there are a thousand improvements, technological and cultural, that we can and should still make. But good enough in its outlines, in its essentials. We need to decide that we live, most of us in the West, long enough. We need to declare that in the West, where few of us work ourselves to the bone, we have ease enough. In societies where most of us need storage lockers more than we need nanotech miracle boxes, we need to declare that we have enough stuff. Enough intelligence. Enough capability. Enough.”

Once we have limited choice to improve overall satisfaction with our decisions, we also need to proclaim, as Mr. McKibben points out, we have enough of what we need. I think from that point, we can start to look at how much more we can contribute, rather than trying to keep up with the pace of life, technology, and the like.

James Kalbach — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:46 GMT

Great interview. Thanks, Liz.

In terms on navigation and page design, I think you also have to take the mode of seeking into account when deciding on the number of options. For known-item seeking, having more trigger words on the page should increase information scent. That’s why Jared Spool and even Forrester recommend making your home page the site map.

But if a visitor is just casuallly browsing best sellers, then yeah – having fewer might be better. It all depends, of course, but challenging the notion of “more is always better” is an important consideration. This is why a thorough understanding of what people are doing on your site is so important. Otherwise, you’re just guessing.