Tom’s Wordpress Blog

Freedom and choice Kind of loaded words, if you ask me. On one hand, it’s fairly intuitive to think of freedom as a great thing in any and all circumstances. But when you think of it in terms of some movements we’re ask to or want to perform, there can be too much of a good thing.

A person with a relatively healthy musculoskeletal system can move with many so called degrees of freedom, in many directions and in every plane of movement available. But not all movements call for all the degrees of freedom available. Golfers, for example, know that moving to the side more than necessary when they swing makes for untidy shots, at the best. Gotta take all degrees of movement freedom you need, but any more than that gets you into trouble. In fact, many of the learning aides advertised so effectively on those golf channel infomercials are based on the idea introducing constraints to the swing movement so as to limit unnecessary movement.

Oddly, I was thinking about this kind of stuff when I ran across Feature Presentation in the New Yorker magazine. It’s odd because James Surowiecki talks about the freedom of available features in many technological devices as not necessarily such a good thing. He calls it “feature creep,” the tendency of many companies to overwhelm their customers with features in the electronic devices they sell — ” fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds o mysterious features and book-lengt manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle,” that sort of thing.

Confronted with this freedom to go nuts with the features, many consumers find themselves more than overwhelmed, wishing they’d never bought the thing in the first place, and, worse, returning it and washing their hands of the whole thing. And it’s not that they don’t want all those features:

A recent study by a trio of marketing academics—Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust—found that when consumers were given a choice of three models, of varying complexity, of a digital device, more than sixty per cent chose the one with the most features. Then, when the subjects were given the chance to customize their product, choosing from twenty-five features, they behaved like kids in a candy store. (Twenty features was the average.) But, when they were asked to use the digital device, so-called “feature fatigue” set in. They became frustrated with the plethora of options they had created, and ended up happier with a simpler product.

The obvious solution is to design a really feature-laden piece of technology with the simplest user interface that will work all that stuff. Like Apple, Inc. has done with the iPod. And now Apple gets to try it all again with the iPhone, set to be released in June. Surowiecki wouldn’t be surprised if Apple either hits a home run or strikes out with the device:

In theory, the best strategy would be to make the complex simple, packaging all the power and the options consumers think they want into a design that they’ll find easy to use. This is clearly what Apple believes it will be offering with the iPhone: a device with a remarkable range of features, coupled with an uncluttered touch-screen interface. It won’t be surprising if the iPhone succeeds, but it would be understandable if it failed. The strange truth about feature creep is that even when you give consumers what they want they can still end up hating you for it.

For more on how too many choices are not such a great thing all the time, see Barry Schwart book The Paradox of Choice. For more on how we don’t know that our choices will necessirly lead to happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is a good read.

Now, if only Apple would make golf equipment!