Design Sapling.com

Next Wednesday through Saturday, I’ll be in Seattle attending An Event Apart, hosted by web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman and CSS guru Eric Meyer. I’ll post some of the things I learn after each session. That will bring me a big step closer to my current goal of presenting all of this stuff to my coworkers.

Also, I’ve already started the next goal: make sure my workgroup starts actually using the things I’ll present. This was originally a year-long goal, but after reading some of The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, I’m going to make that a 3-month goal. In the book, Ferriss points out that long-term goals turn into excuses for not taking action. It hit me as being pretty true so I’m going to take 3-months to push this effort through and then…my third goal I can’t talk about yet. Thanks to my buddy Mike for lending the book.

How is this new goal coming along? Instead of just jumping in and coding on this new project, we’ve actually taken then the time to plan something out. It will save us weeks of frustration and dozens of bug complaints.

My coworker is catching on quickly about using semantic HTML and making it easy for me to implement my visual design of the site using CSS. It’s standards compliant, accessible by cellphones and screenreaders, and not ugly. That’s above and beyond for this particular client.

Guy Kawasaki’s latest post How to Change the World: The Lesson of Tam’s Art Gallery gives us another example of choice vs happiness.

The previous post considered how we could support the stance that both limiting choices and increasing choices could make us happier (or the flip-side, how can they make us less happy). The conclusion was that we must balance. Offer enough choice that we are satisfied that our users and purchasers are getting a good option, but not so many choices that they are paralyzed to even make a choice.

The book About Face 3.0 by Alan Cooper comes at that end result from a different perspective. I’ll paraphrase from the book:

The old logic is that you must create a product that is as broad in functionality as possible to accommodate most people. (In relation to the previous post, this is like having 45 different spaghetti sauces…or only one package of Adobe CS3 with every program in it. -Jeremy)
This logic is flawed! When you put so many features in a product, the cognitive load and navigational overhead interfere with a users satisfaction. The best way to design software is to design for specific types of individuals with specific goals.

Enough options to satisfy those target markets, but not so much to overwhelm them. Hooray!

Malcom Gladwell wrote one of my favorite books, the Tipping Point.

A few years ago at TED Gladwell gave an interesting presentation on What We Can Learn from Spaghetti Sauce.

The gist of the presentation is this (definitely check it out yourself though):
Old Theory on Marketing: There is a single sweet spot for a product that everyone will be satisfied with.
New Theory on Marketing: We can offer a multitude of variations to target the diversity.

Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory at Swathmore, also gave an interesting TED presentation.

The gist of his presentation is this (also see this one for yourself):
Old Theory on Happiness: To maximize freedom, we must offer choice in everything. The more choice, the more freedom; the more freedom, the more happiness.
New Theory on Happiness: Choices in everything will limit our capacity to make well-thought out choice for important things.

In other words, if we worry about the small stuff, like which peanut butter should I buy, we lose time and focus for worrying about those really big issues, like should I getting married or switch my career. Things that don’t happen every day but are far more important.

According to LiveScience, most of the stress in our lives is unnecessary and it shortens our lives.

So we all want less stress and more happiness, right?

But don’t Malcolm and Schwartz seem to have conflicting ideas? How could getting to select the one salad dressing out of 12 that comes closest to our idea of perfection make us happier, while at the same time making us unhappier since we can never be satisfied that we made the best decision?

They are both correct. As a producer of a product, you will want to tailor the product to your user. This is what Malcom is saying: people are complex and want different things. People don’t know what they want until you find out what it is and give it to them, and then they will be enthusiastic about your product. He isn’t saying that people crave choice, however. You can CUSTOMIZE a product to fit the audience. You increase your audience when the reputation is good. I also agree that those new choices create a burden on the customer, as Barry Schwartz implies. What’s good for business isn’t always good for the customer’s well-being.

You should customize your product to offer the least number of choices, but make the choices important ones to the consumer. Ones they will feel happy they have to make instead of ones that make them scratch their heads. Did the consumer really need the choice between extra chunky and regular? No, obviously not. They didn’t even know they wanted it. BUT, they narrowed those flavors down to the best ones. They didn’t release all 45 flavors.

Even so, they did indeed increase the choices, which means consumers have a bit more stress in deciding which is best. Is that okay? Sure, it increased sales, but overall, the consumer is slightly worse off because now they have this burden of choice for something not really important. It’s not really a big deal, but these little things can add up (In my family, we can never make a decision. Little choices are huge roadblocks to leaving the grocery store before sundown.) But the happiness they get from having a better sauce probably outweighs the stress from the extra choices. That’s the key.

You’ve got to give enough choices so that you target your main markets, but not so many that they are paralyzed with indecision. People might think they want tons of options, but it won’t make them happier. Don’t waste your time. Focus on the things that they will use and make them easy and effective.

So what about Adobe offering up 4 or so different versions of Photoshop? We’ve got Elements, regular CS3, and the extended. I think the difference between CS3 and Elements is substantial and warranted. Very different markets. But extended? It’s a ploy to make more money. It does indeed cause distress in the consumer. But it’s good for business, right? Additionally, they offer 7 or so different combo packages for the CS3 suite. There isn’t one that’s right for me. I hate Dreamweaver, but like Illustrator. I am going to buy one, but the choices are paralyzing me. I have been putting this off for a long time and the trial versions are almost expired. Maybe Adobe needs MORE choices? If they didn’t have any combo packages at all, I wouldn’t be so stressed (although it’d definitely be more expesive, and I’d stress over that.)