Simplicity versus features and the paralyzing trade offs
Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, Speaks about a study where people were asked to lower the price of a car with less safety features to make it equivalent in value as a more expensive car with more safety features.
“Since the alternatives were equivalent, you might expect that about half the people would choose the safer, more expensive car and half would choose the less safe, cheaper car. But that is not what the researchers found. Most participants chose the safer, more expensive car. When forced to choose, most people refused to trade safety for price. They acted as if the importance of safety to their decision was so great that price was essentially irrelevant…
Even though their decision was purely hypothetical, participants experienced substantial negative emotion when choosing between Cars A and B. And if the experimental procedure gave them the opportunity, they refused to make the decision at all. So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive…
Confronting any trade-off, it seems, is incredibly unsettling. And as the available alternatives increase, the extent to which choices will require trade-offs will increase as well.”
And in his post: http://www.uie.com/articles/simplicity/
Joshua Porter extrapolates to other products:
“Users face a trade-off when they must make a choice between a simple product or a complex product with more features. If they choose the product with fewer features and eventually need some functionality that is missing, they’ve made a bad choice.
…Instead of focusing on adding features, design teams should focus on helping users find out what they really need before they purchase. When design teams understand that buyers want to avoid trade-offs, they can use this insight to their advantage.”