Considering some people might face difficulty to choose among variety of options and spent a lot of time browsing on a particular entertainment website. I intend to create a new and subjective categorization for these people. I feel that my new interpretation on the categorization of a particular entertainment website (YouTube) will help these people to decide which option is best and most suitable for them.
Enquiry:
Is there a terminology to describe my target audience?
- Google Search: Terminology for people who can't make decision
Yahoo Answer: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100706162551AAzrmQm
• Indecisive
Not having or showing the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively
• Waffling.
Fail to make up one's mind.
• Perseverating.
Getting stuck on a word, an idea or an activity and not being able to move on from it.
• Ambivalent
Having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.
- I got the definitions for these words by Google Dictionary
Critical Judgement:
Two of the terminologies stated above - Indecisive and Waffling are the terminologies that i'm looking for to describe my target audience.
- Google Search: Terminology for people who face difficulty to choose among variety of options and spent a lot of time browsing on a particular entertainment website
Google Result: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/28/easier-is-better-than-better/
Article: Easier Is Better Than Better By Paul Scrivens on November 28th, 2011
Barry Schwartz comes to an interesting conclusion involving human choice in his book, The Paradox of Choice. - “People choose not on the basis of what’s most important, but on what’s easiest to evaluate.”
In ‘N Out is known for their very limited menu. Too many choices are distracting and require more time for making a final decision what to order. Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mesohungry/4525295937/
Woot.com is an online store with a twist. Instead of browsing through hundreds or thousands of items, you are offered only one item a day. If you like it, you buy it and if you don’t, you wait until tomorrow to see what is going to show up. The site is successful and yet the logic of it all seems backwards. However, if I’m running a store, does it really matter whether I’m selling 100 units of 1 item or 100 different items for 1 unit at a time? Woot makes the shopping experience easy by making our choice simply “yes” or “no”.
How much less fun would Angry Birds be if you had to select the birds you could use before each level? Taking away that choice and letting us focus on how to use the birds we are given makes the game much more enjoyable. By not choosing which bird to play with in each level, one can focus more on how to use them. Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/65999620@N00/5423823785/
How often do you come across a site that offers you better features than their competitors, but they aren’t as easy to use. There is no reason to switch over to a service that is harder to use even if they have more features. If the features aren’t there to make my life easier then what good does the service do me?
User Settings And Choice
Jared Spool and his team wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in MS Word and which settings they had changed. Less than 5% of the users they surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in. Jared Spool realized that the large majority of people don’t seem to want to tweak though — they just want to use the application.
It is great to provide the user with the ability to make changes, but settings aren’t a must-have feature. Building a great product that just works should be priority number one. Users assume you are giving them the settings that are best for them right off the bat. If you aren't, then they might view your product as a failure.
The Paradox Of Choice
The paradox of choice says that the more options available to an individual, the harder it becomes to make a selection. More choices don’t make the selection process easier for people, but having no choices takes away some of the freedom they believe they have.
According to Barry Schwartz, it is much easier to find your pair of crocs if there are fewer color options available. Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/harrymia/1497582785/
When deciding on which of the new iPhones you should get, you can either get it in black or white and three different memory options. Add in multiple carriers though and the choice starts to become a little more complicated.
If a client tells you that you can do their design any way you choose, it is more difficult than having to do a design with constraints because your options are endless. We need constraints, limited choices, to be built into everything that we do. This makes decision making easier and the benefit of this is an easier design to use.
If somehow you can make the easiest product and the best product in the industry, you have yourself a winner.
What this means is that the design that is easiest to evaluate (less options to choose from) will win most of the time. Make your copy straight to the point. Don’t waste your time on graphics that don’t drive the point home. I have a hard enough time picking my outfit in the morning — don’t make me try to decide which one of the 250 default avatars I should use.
Notes:
I found two terminologies to describe my target audience. I also found interesting ideas which are similar to what i have in my mind and good case studies to support my project concept through this research.
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