{"id":523,"date":"2007-10-26T07:46:45","date_gmt":"2007-10-26T12:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/archives\/523"},"modified":"2007-10-26T08:07:02","modified_gmt":"2007-10-26T13:07:02","slug":"seeing-fewer-choices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/archives\/523","title":{"rendered":"Seeing fewer choices"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"right\" alt=\"Chase See Fewer Choices\" id=\"image524\" src=\"http:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/10\/Chase1.png\" \/><strong>Alternatively titled:<\/strong> On Covering Your Ass<\/p>\n<p>Check out that picture on the right. That&#8217;s from my credit card&#8217;s website. My favorite part is the red link on the bottom that proclaims, &#8220;See fewer choices.&#8221; You know what that option is? That&#8217;s a designer or usability person saying to the team, &#8220;Hello team, we have heard from users that there are too many choices on the screen.&#8221; Then the usability\/design person recommends that we prioritize the options on the screen and <a title=\"Progressive Disclosure on Alertbox\" href=\"http:\/\/www.useit.com\/alertbox\/progressive-disclosure.html\">progressively disclose<\/a> them so that only the most used choices will be shown up front.<\/p>\n<p>Then someone on the team shouts, &#8220;But we can&#8217;t remove links that are already there! Users will haaaaate that! Maybe we can just put an option to &#8216;See fewer choices,&#8217; that way we can make everyone happy!&#8221; The designer\/usability person shakes their head in disapproval. What the team did in is take the easy way out. Rather than analyzing user needs on a deeper level and getting an understanding about what choices are valuable at each point in time, they simply put a link to &#8220;See fewer choices.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Lazy, lazy, lazy.<\/p>\n<p>Building usable tools is about more than giving the user exactly what they ask for. It&#8217;s about designing for needs&#8230;needs that the users themselves can sometimes be blind to. It&#8217;s about thinking deeply about problems, and crafting creative solutions based on data (that has been gathered from the real world of the users).<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s work a little harder to make better software, shall we? I shall. Who&#8217;s with me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alternatively titled: On Covering Your Ass Check out that picture on the right. That&#8217;s from my credit card&#8217;s website. My favorite part is the red link on the bottom that proclaims, &#8220;See fewer choices.&#8221; You know what that option is? That&#8217;s a designer or usability person saying to the team, &#8220;Hello team, we have heard [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,23,2,21,10,12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-free-design-idea","category-hci-topic","category-professional","category-rambling","category-technology","category-thoughtworks"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josh.ev9.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}