Last week, I wrote a post describing the data behind the Semantic Web. The basic premise was that the Semantic Web breaks all of our information down into little bits that we can manipulate as much as we want. As I’ve said before, though, having that much data can be messy. In order for the Semantic Web to be able to serve us rather than the other way around, we need an effective interface that allows us to navigate intuitively through a sea of infinite information.

The choice paradox
We tend to think choice is good, and the more choice the better. Our experiences, however, tell us otherwise. In the book ‘Blink’, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of an experiment conducted by Sheena Iyengar:

She once conducted another experiment in which she set up a tasting booth with a variety of exotic gourmet jams at the upscale grocery store Draeger’s in Menlo Park, California. Sometimes the booth had six different jams, and sometimes Iyengar had twenty-four different jams on display. She wanted to see whether the number of jam choices made any difference in the number of jams sold. Conventional economic wisdom, of course, says that the more choices consumers have, the more likely they are to buy, because it is easier for consumers to find the jam that perfectly fits their needs. But Iyengar found the opposite to be true. Thirty percent of those who stopped by the six-choice booth ended up buying some jam, while only 3 percent of those who stopped by the bigger booth bought anything. Why is that? Because buying jam is a snap decision. You say to yourself, instinctively, I want that one. And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed. Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and if we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that frugality.

Think of a situation in which the amount of consideration that had to go into a purchase seemed overwhelming—car-buying is a good one for many people. I remember the very first car I bought. I agonized over it for weeks. In the case of cars, the paralysis is for a different financial reason than it is for jam: you’re spending a good amount of money, and so you want to be sure to make the right decision. But the level of expertise required to make a ‘right’ decision in such a vast realm of choices leaves most of us feeling uninformed and uncertain about our ultimate selection. This, I suspect, is where ‘buyer’s remorse’ comes from: the inability to be sure that one option among millions is correct.

Not to have choice is anathema to most of us. Too much choice can paralyze us. Clearly, there’s a bell curve here, a point at which users and consumers have an optimum number of choices: enough that they can feel independent, not so much that they become despondent.

The paradox of choice will become increasingly important in the context of the Semantic Web. If all of the information on the Web is available as infinitely manipulatable data, how can we find the optimum point on the choice bell curve? I believe the answer lies in the interface.

Visible choices
A user interface is the means by which people can access the choices available to them. It essentially offers the user that part of the iceberg that is above water. By selectively revealing options that reveal more and more as the user progresses, an interface can deliver infinite choice in appropriate-size chunks for users to process.

Wizards (like mail merge wizards) are a great example of how a user interface can be used to make many choices seem manageable. I’ve been managing the development of a web tool that allows users to create promotional pdfs based on pre-set templates. The users have 36 possible templates to choose from, but our tool doesn’t show them 36 templates, or 18, or six. It shows them three. Then it asks if they want black & white or color. Then it asks which of three themes they want. Then it asks if they want a bold or minimalist design. Each of these questions is a ‘jam choice’, a snap decision from a small pool of options. Taken together, though, they lead the user comfortably down a path towards a confident decision.

If all of us who create the Web—every site owner, developer, widget maker, and blogger—adapt our material to the standards-compliant RDF framework, the fertile entrepreneurial ground will lie in creating interfaces that allow users to access the richness that is the Semantic Web without losing their minds. Sites like FaceBook encounter the challenge with thousands of personalization options; Google, inasmuch as they’ve got News and Blogs and Images along the top, are still, at their core, a single page with a simple text box. The lack of choices on the page allows users to feel comfortable with the infinite choices available in the query.

I had intended to touch on VortexDNA’s contribution to the interface in this post, but I suspect it’s getting rather long-winded, so I shall park it for another day. For now, how much choice do you want in your personal Web experience, and what do you think is the best way for providers to address varying preferences?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 11:14 am and is filed under Semantic Web, VortexDNA, Web 3.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.