Design: Lack of Choice Improves Client Outcomes

I found an art­icle recently that too much choice has a neg­at­ive impact. Excessive Choice — The Frontal Cortex doc­u­ments an exper­i­ment where presents test sub­jects with fewer choices of chocol­ate increased the hap­pi­ness of the out­come. Where sub­jects were presen­ted with thirty or more choices, they were more unhappy with the choice that was made.

Intuitive — well yes, and no

I find this intu­it­ive as an exper­i­ence, while real­ising that I have the same prob­lem. For example. when I am ana­lys­ing load bal­an­cers to choose for a net­work design, you really are going to choose from Cisco or F5. Each product has clear dif­fer­en­ti­at­ors so the choice is usu­ally straightforward.

But choos­ing between switch­ing products is less clear. For example, The Cisco 6500 is now not really suit­able for 10Gig net­works because it doesn’t have enough backplane/​blade band­width, and the Nexus ⁷⁰⁰⁰⁄₅₀₀₀ isn’t ready for main­stream deploy­ment¹.

So now we might be look­ing at altern­at­ives such as Foundry, Force10 and the whole array of play­ers who pro­duce 10Gb switches. But which one to choose from ? The range of choice and product sep­ar­a­tion can be quite small, and you can waste a lot of time con­sid­er­ing from what are essen­tially identical products.

This research also sug­gests that you are likely to be unhappy with the out­come, regard­less of your choice. I guess it is some form of buy­ers remorse that sets in, but this is cer­tainly true in my experience.

Choosing Cisco is easy

For many com­pan­ies, choos­ing Cisco as a prime sup­plier is easy. And we jus­tify this in terms of lead­ing ser­vice and good products etc, but this research also sug­gests that restrict­ing the choices means that you will be hap­pier with the out­come. By select­ing only from the Cisco price list, you may per­ceive that your hap­pi­ness level will be higher as your mind is hap­pier with less choice.

Fascinating isn’t it. By restrict­ing your choices you may actu­ally be rein­for­cing your belief that you are mak­ing the right decision.

I am not going to den­ig­rate other areas such as TAC sup­port, Purchasing panel agree­ments, Cisco Pre-​​sales engin­eers, and free t-​​shirts in influ­en­cing our decisions, but the pur­chas­ing decision can be complicated.

Conclusion

When I com­mence a design, I am really look­ing to reduce the vari­ables in front of me to a man­age­able form. I want to reduce my choices so that selec­tion becomes a pos­it­ive pro­cess rather than a neg­at­ive one. That is, I will dis­card design options in the early stages by focus­sing on neg­at­ives, but later I want to have pos­it­ive mes­sages and focus on strengths, not weak­nesses, and fea­tures not threats. Why ? Because the decision makers often need to feel ‘good’ about a decision, and a meet­ing which cov­ers the neg­at­ives will often lead to a delayed decision or lack of pro­ject progress.

What I had not real­ised, was that redu­cing choices actu­ally made for ‘hap­pier choos­ing’ after the fact.

I like that. We need more happiness.

Reference

The Frontal Cortex

Footnotes

1. it should be ready in a year or so when the new blades ship, its really only pilot and test­ing at the moment [back]

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