I just listened to a really great podcast by Jared Spool and Barry Schwartz at UIE on Podcast: Designing for the Paradox of Choice.

We have all been in the scenario before where you go to a restaurant where the waiter or waitress comes up and asks to take your order. So you tell the waitperson that you would like a steak. You are then asked, "How would you like that cooked?" to which you reply, with your choice of cooked temperature. Then you are questioned, "Would you like soup or salad?" then "what type of salad" then "what kind of dressing?" then "would you like a potato with that?" then "mashed or baked," "with sour cream or without?" By the end of the whole process you are about ready to choke the waiter because all you want is your damn steak and who knew ordering a steak would be soo damn difficult?

Well in the podcast they discuss how we are much better off now because we can get exactly what we want because we have soo many choices, but the process of getting what you is soo difficult you are often left less satisfied with the eventual outcome. Much of what they talk about is based on a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP, Vol. 79, No. 6) that showed that, "when shoppers are given the option of choosing among smaller and larger assortments of jam, they show more interest in the larger assortment. But when it comes time to pick just one, they're 10 times more likely to make a purchase if they choose among six rather than among 24 flavors of jam. " Hence the question I posed in the title of this post, "Is offering 31 Flavors bad for business?"

The reason I found this so fascinating and so relevant is that I am a Quality Assurance Engineer, who often has to either design parts of the user interface for our new products, or critique parts of others designs and we are often presented with this problem. The problem is trying to allow a product to be flexible to meet everyone's needs without making the process of getting there completely frustrating to the majority of users. We have a general rule that we go by when we are designing new parts of our application, you want to make the default choice for users the option that 75-80% of your users is going to choose. This might seem simple and obvious, but you have to ask yourself this question multiple times a day when you are looking at software design. By designing to make life as easy as possible for the 75-80% of the users we hope to make the software we hope to keep them from having to make endless choices when using our tools. This however doesn't mean that our software is not flexible, its just that we try to keep some of the more obscure choices that you need to make outside of the main workflow (in areas like the options menu). We even offer an Articulate Presenter SDK for those who don't just want the 31 choices of ice cream but want the possibility of having a 140 different flavors of ice cream that the ice cream makers had probably never dreamed of. So by moving the endless choices out of the main workflow of a product we are able (hopefully) to satisfy the simplicity needs of the many while still offering options to satisfy the other 20-25%.