MacFormat: The Apple Watch provides you with just the right amount of choice

Source: www.techradar.com --- Sunday, October 12, 2014 We're often told that having choice is always and absolutely a good thing. The fact that we're told it most often by politicians should be a clue that this is irredeemable nonsense. In fact, thanks to a 2000 paper called When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, we know it's nonsense. You might have heard of it by its more colloquial name: the jam experiment. In this study, the researchers tested how shoppers responded to choice. Given a selection of 24 jams, just 3% of shoppers picked up a jar. Narrow that choice to a more manageable six, and suddenly a third of the subjects in the test picked a preserve. The authors concluded that people can suffer from "choice overload" - that when you're presented with too many options, you freeze up, unable to pick between them. It follows then that if a company wants people to buy its products, it actually shouldn't follow the classical free market teachings of offering a broad, diversified range. Keep it simple, or the customer might well turn away in frustration before they get anywhere near checkout. There is a parallel with Apple here. The accepted rhetoric is that when Steve Jobs rejoined the company in 1997 (after being ousted in 1985 by then-CEO John Sculley), his most brutal but vital act was to rationalise the company line-up by cancelling projects and ditching products. In the 90s, Apple had reacted to the threat of th ...

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