The other day I watched Professor Barry Schwartz’s Google lecture on “The Paradox of Choice”. The idea, I think, is important and somewhat intuitive: that too much choice can be overwhelming. It can lead to an unwillingness to make any choice at all, or to poor decision-making based on the wrong characteristics. (Watch the video for an in-depth explanation.) This is just my attempt to summarize part of what he said, which I found particularly interesting.

For designers, there seem to be two things we can do to help people deal with overwhelming choices (and/or manipulate them to make the choices we want, depending on your point of view). There are two situations: the situation where a default exists and the user can get away with taking no action, and the situation where no default exists and the user must make a choice.

For the first situation, he gives the example of organ donorship on your driver’s license. A default exists: no organ donorship. The user can get away without making a choice, and most of the time, s/he does.

This situation is fairly easy to deal with for designers; simply make the default the “right” choice, and it will be selected most of the time. Never require someone to take extra action to make the “right” choice, if possible. (Except, of course, where this runs up against legal, moral, or ethical considerations.) An example of this is opt-out, rather than opt-in, organ donorship in Europe, where the rates of organ donorship are much higher. Another example is default enrollment in 401(k) plans, which has recently experienced a huge burst of popularity.

The other situation, in which no default exists and users must make a choice, is also subject to simplification (and/or manipulation). Just highlight or prominently feature a much smaller group of choices, and many users will be driven to choose from that set, simply to reduce the cognitive cost of dealing with all those other options.

Schwartz gives the example of the NYC diners, with 50-page menus and the 5 “Daily Specials” that never change (and are, coincidentally, the most expensive items on the menu). The Daily Specials are by far the most popular items. (You don’t even have to open the menu to see them!) This way, if you have something specific in mind, you can still get it, but the majority of people who don’t will have an easy way to make a choice from a narrow set of options.

So there we have it. Two situations, default and no-default, and a way to drive user behaviour in each.