Joel Spolsky is a bright guy. His latest blog posting about user interface design, Choices = Headaches (should that be == instead?), makes a case that I’ve been rolling around internally for our Next Big Product. Simplisticly: sometimes too many choices are worse than you’d think.
The really amazing part is that he references some research done by Barry Schwartz, a professor at Swarthmore College. Amazingly enough, I just listened to a podcast of one of his lectures on this topic this week: Too Many Choices: Who Suffers and Why. It’s really in interesting lecture, and worth an hour of anyone’s time who is tasked with product design.
I continue to be amazed at how the Blogosphere™ cross-links itself in fascinating ways.
Daniel Kahneman mentioned in Schwartz’s lecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman
One of the OpenBSD developer mantras is: “We hate buttons.” They program everything with sensible defaults and don’t provide much in the way of customization. I am immensely satisfied with that. For instance, if you want to configure a NIC, use ifconfig. Want to configure a wireless adapter? Use ifconfig. Want to see what your adapter settings are? Use ifconfig. Contrast that to the absolutely INSANE way to determine your link speed and duplex under Solaris (http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Solaris_NIC_speed_and_duplex_settings.html). And contrast to Linux’s condemnable ethtool.
See also Robert H. Frank’s, “How Not To Buy Happiness” — http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/daed_133_2_69_0.pdf