The title–in fact, all–of this post comes from the book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a book about knowing what you don’t know.

“I noticed that very intelligent and informed person were at no advantage over cabdrivers in their predictions, but there was a crucial difference. Cabdrivers did no believe that they understood as much as learned people–really, they were not the experts and they knew it. Nobody knew anything, but elite thinkers thought that they knew more than the rest because they were elite thinkers, and if you’re a member of the elite, you automatically know more than the nonelite.”

Knowing nothing can be good. And yes, knowing too much can be bad.

Just try not to think like a technician (or a member of the elite).

In many situations, I think making something simple is knowing when to make a special case. And I’d further guess that usually you don’t want to make one. Here’s an example where someone did not make a special case.

Eric Sink lives in the same city as University of Illinois. He ordered a Rose Bowl ticket, and here’s what he said happened:

“I laughed out loud. UPS Overnight? I live right here in Champaign-Urbana. The University of Illinois Athletic Ticket Office is less than two miles from my office. Surely I could just go over during my lunch hour and pick them up?

“No, I suppose not. These folks are trying to process orders for over 25,000 tickets and they have very little time to do it. They probably just want to have one standard method of handling them all. Dealing with the special cases would slow everything down.”

He goes on to show another example of when a special case was the better choice.

“Sure enough — my tickets were being sent 1.8 miles by ‘Next Day Air.’ At this point, I fully expected that this envelope would be traveling across town by way of O’Hare.

“Much to my surprise, UPS actually figured out that it was already in its destination city”

I’m not sure it is always so obvious when to make the special case. There is unlikely to be any formula to help you decide. One of the troubles is that a special case involves a trade-off of whether you’re making things easier on you, or easier on your user. The art is deciding when each is the best choice.

Whenever we interact with the world, we use an interface. Most shoes are easy to put on because the process of slipping feet into them is easy. Your typical shoe interface is simple and elegant, at least until you get to the laces.

My friends at Needmore Designs noticed a problem with the latest ActionScript, the language used to create Flash movies:

And until recently, it was appropriately simple: you just use the getURL command, and pass it a string exactly like you would in your web browser. Hard to improve on such simplicity and perfection, isn’t it?

Oh, but they have. Now you use the navigateToURL command… but you can’t just pass it the link… now you must first create a URLRequest object to pass it.

What Adobe must have seen as a technical fix was really an interface change. In the name of making something powerful, they removed a simple command that worked really well for most users.

There are tough decisions in determining any interface. Do you fix something you think is broken when many users have already learned it? There are trade-offs to making any change, even if you think it’s the right choice.

But in this case, Adobe and their users could have had it both ways. The getURL command could have put together its own call to the more complicated navigateToURL. Users could still have their old, simple way and their new, powerful method.

This post is the last of a series about The Paradox of Choice, a book about why more is less. Leave a comment below and I may randomly pick you to win one of three autographed copies. Read more of this series.

Much like my camera buying experience, when faced with too much choice, people often choose nothing. Too many choices make us feel like we should be maximizers.

In the book, Schwartz wrote about a study that looked at jam tastings. They split the participants into two groups:

Some people were presented with six different samples on a table, while others saw twenty-four. They could taste as many as they wanted, and then were given a coupon for a $1 discount on any jam they purchased. The larger display of samples attracted more shoppers, but these individuals did no sample more different jams. Remarkably, shoppers who saw the larger display were less likely actually to buy jam than those who saw the smaller display. Much less likely.

People prefer a little pre-filtering. It’s why I have such a great experience at my local hardware store. Surprisingly, this finding remains true for smaller number of choices. In this next example, one good choice is shown to be better than two good choices:

You can get a popular Sony CD player for only $99, well below list price. Do you buy it, or do you continue to research other brands and models? Now imagine that the sign in the window offers both the $99 Sony and a $169 top-of-the-line Aiwa, also well below list price. Do you buy either of them, or do you postpone the decision and do more research?

When given only one choice, 2/3 of people go ahead and make the purchase. That means 1/3 choose to keep looking. When given two choices, an equal number of people choose each CD player, but nearly half decide to buy nothing. Here it is a little clearer, in a painful-to-implement Google chart:

This means that at a point that most people are perfectly happy to satisfice, they become overwhelmed when given more choices. As a chooser, it means being willing to “settle” when something is good enough.

As someone providing choices (to your customers, or on your website), it means doing a little bit of pre-filtering, and be willing to not have as many options, because the more we see, the less we like.

This bonus post is part of a series about The Paradox of Choice, a book about why more is less. Leave a comment below and I may randomly pick you to win one of three autographed copies. Read more of this series.

There was so much to say about The Hot Chick, I missed the chance to show how nobody cares about status, as long as the other guy is doing worse than them.

People were asked to choose between earning $50,000 a year with others earning $25,000 and earning $100,000 a year with others earning $200,000. They were asked to choose between 12 years of education (high school) when others have 8, and 16 years of education (college) when others have 20. They were asked to choose between an IQ of 110 when the IQ of others is 90 and an IQ of 130 when the IQ of others is 150. In most cases, more than half of the respondents chose the options that gave them better relative position. Better to be a big fish, earning $50,000, in a small pond than a small fish, earning $100,000, in a big one.

Again, all that has changed is a simple frame of reference. A New Yorker cartoon of an employee talking to his boss, republished in the book, makes the point succinctly: “O.K., if you can’t see your way to giving me a pay raise, how about giving Parkerson a pay cut?”