CHOOSED OFF

Dick Pountain/Mon 19 April 2004/12:21 pm/Idealog 117

I made a feeble attempt to buy a new laptop last week, before the end of the tax year (in case it escaped you, the provision under which you can write off a computer over one year has just been dropped). The attempt failed because, despite miles of tramping pavements and typing 'the quik bowrn fox' onto dodgy little keyboards, I couldn't find one that did what I wanted at a price I wanted to pay. The dinky little Sony TR2MP tempted me briefly and for £800 I'd have snapped it up - except that it costs £1600 (I can wait until Kellogs start giving it away in cornflake packets). Plus I've been inoculated against Sony by horror stories about their service quality. I ogled the Acer C111 Tablet for a while, but then had a premonition of that precarious-looking swivel hinge snapping and giving me two for the price of one. The R40 series Thinkpads came closest to what I was looking for, except that Satan has persuaded IBM to leave out a USB2 port and thus rendered them useless.

Despite the vast plethora of choices before me, I couldn't find what I wanted and came away deeply irritated. A couple of days later I opened the April edition of Scientific American and read a fascinating article called 'The Tyranny of Choice' by Barry Schwartz, a US professor of Social Theory. Schwartz presents the conclusions of recent research into consumer choice - why do so many people end up unhappy rather than pleased as their range of options increases? Summed up very briefly, he concludes that some choice is much better than no choice but that more choice beyond a point is no longer better, and he and his colleagues investigated the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that produce this effect.

Firstly Schwartz's team realised that people's expectations vary and that they could measure this using questionnaires. Their spectrum ranges from 'maximisers' at one end, who always aim to make the best possible choice, to 'satisficers'  (a term coined by the late Nobel Laureate H. A. Simon) at the other end who aim only for good enough, regardless of whether better choices might exist. I quickly established from the accompanying quiz that I'm in fact an extreme satisficer, which is probably why I write this column and not PC Pro reviews.

Then there's 'opportunity cost', the effect whereby making one choice involves losing an opportunity to have chosen otherwise. This effect can be illustrated experimentally:  people consistently place a lower dollar value on offers (from magazine subscriptions to airline flights) that are presented against several competing offers rather than in isolation. Not surprisingly this phenomenon affects maximisers more strongly than it does satisficers. The next component is regret. Many people not only feel sorry for the opportunities they've forgone, but also regret the choice they did make - hence post-purchase justification and a lot of the sales of this magazine (oops, that just slipped out). Again maximisers regret more keenly than satisficers. Finally there's 'adaptation', whereby the enthusiasm that you feel after making a good choice quickly levels off and does not sustain itself: as we say, the 'novelty wears off'. People consistently overestimate for how long a positive experience will make them feel good. It seems that the human consitution is so set up as to regret losses harder and for longer than it appreciates perks - this may well be hard-wired into our genes by evolution, as an adaptive mechanism for dealing with a dangerous world.

So, opportunity cost rises with the number of choices while satisfaction quickly plateaus, and the net result is demonstrated in the accompanying graph: satisfaction rises for a while as choices increase but then plunges below the axis into gloom. At the origin is infinite dissatisfaction - the condition of the slave without freedom, or of consumers in the former Soviet Union  confronted by a single style of cardboard shoe. However we dwellers in Euro/American consumer paradise may now be descending the slippery slope through too many choices about too many important things - pensions, medical plans, life partners. Schwartz touches on these more serious social consequences, and his next project will be to probe correlations between the maximiser personality type and clinical depression. 

My fruitless trek last week demonstrates the effect in the IT business - vendors rush out ever more models at ever more frequent intervals, confusing the hell out of buyers and making a living for us in consumer magazines. And what about software user interfaces? Industry dogma has it that more customisability means better, but perhaps it just leads to irritation and 'burn out'. No-one wants to return to DOS utilities with three command-line switches, but are 3-level, 15-tab properties dialogs so much better? Skins and Themes, often derided by 'grown-up' users, actually represent a sensible step toward taming choice. Although some web sites may contain thousands of skins, each single skin encapsulates - and thus hides - dozens of individual colour, size and font settings, saving you from having to think about them individually: you browse a catalogue of skins using your fast and acute visual sense, rather than groping among settings dialogs using your abstract mathematical brain. The vendors' usability gurus need to spend more time selecting sensible defaults, and providing ways to aggregate and inherit useable combinations, rather than devising yet more options.