The paradox of choice: Why more is less, and less is more.
Nowadays, people are overwhelmed with information. This signal vs noise problem keeps showing up everywhere.
In web design, preferences settings is consider a bad thing to have. Good designers make those decisions for their users.
“Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.” – Steve Jobs
In consumer products, companies with fewer product types tend to do better. Consider GM vs BMW and Honda. More choices tend to confuse consumers. Another example is Mac vs PC.
In dating, because of the existence of online dating websites, people tend to become restless. Why settle when there are so many options out there to choose from?
A few years old, you have Reddit vs Digg. Reddit used to be my favorite website. The quality of stories used to be better with fewer categories. Now, I read hacker news. How long would it be before hacker news become like Reddit? Consider another example: Twitter usage. You can tell when someone is using Twitter as a marketing tool when he is following more than 200 people. Unless you have nothing to do, and reading tweets was your full time job, there is no way anyone could handle all that information overload. If you are following more than 200 people, you simply don’t read your Twitter tweets. I know it because I don’t.
More is less. On the other hand, less is more. If I learned three words from more than one year of working on my startup TrAvid, this is it. Hence, the title of this blog.
