This 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.

Whenever I go to huge hardware stores like Home Depot or Lowes, I’m overwhelmed. Since buying the new place, we’ve spent a lot of time between our house and the nearby local hardware store, Beaumont Hardware.

Don’t judge them by their website. It looks like a boring hardware store, but it’s a magical place. I’ve confirmed this with neighbors and friends. Finding what I need at Beaumont Hardware is an order of magnitude easier than the big stores.

This is because they offer me fewer choices. They have already found the best two or three options for an item, so I don’t have to consider the bad ones. Much like my camera search, too many choices overwhelm.

A preview of my week-long series on The Paradox of Choice:

• Are you a maximizer or satisficer?
• The pessimist’s dilemma
• Good? Compared to what?, plus a bonus post: Nobody Cares About Status
• The more I see, the less I like

You know how you run into useless parked domain sites as you’re clicking around the web? They have keyword links on the left side, a text header with the domain name, and absolutely no useful content. These sites all look alike, kind of like this:

But only one of those is a parked domain. The other is an actual site. Can you guess which is which?

The real site is Metro Mark Corp (the one of the left), the same company that was paying for Google Ads to nowhere two years ago.

Now, I’m no designer, but think a very basic requirement of any site is to not look like spam.

With today’s announcement of the Google Charts API, anybody who can figure out how to use it can easily add charts to their site. The same way embedded maps became ubiquitous, now every site can apply basic information visualization.

Again, The Goog has chosen an expensive market and made it free. And again, they’ve made it just hard enough that it takes some work to use it.

When they released the Google Maps API, it had no way to convert addresses to latitude/longitude coordinates. With Charts, they make the publisher do the work of converting numbers to the right scale and granularity.

You can pass Google Charts numbers, but they probably can’t be your raw numbers. It’s basic math to convert your data into a scale for a chart, but computers are really good at basic math. I wish they did it for me.

In Google’s guidelines for granularity, they explain themselves a bit. They don’t want us sending queries for a graph thousands of data points long when it will only be shown in, say, 250 pixels.

Fair enough, but as it stands, it needs to be easier. For me to use their charts on the fly, I need to be able to pass my raw numbers in the URL. I can do that with this sparklines generator.

I’m sure we’ll be seeing all sorts of create-a-chart tools going up in the next few weeks. That will make it easier to add these simple charts to any web page.

Until then, break out your calculators. You have some basic math to do.

If you’ve been to a conference recently, chances are you’ve heard a speaker say, “I’ll put these on SlideShare.” The website makes it easy to post and view slides by providing a Flash player, eliminating the trouble of large files and presentation software compatibility.

Already it’s simple, but they make things even easier by making registration optional. You can upload slides and share them without creating an account. Then, if you change your mind, when you register the presentations will become part of your account.

SlideShare is an excellent example of something I asked for over two years ago. I suggested we should make 2006 the Year of the Optional Registration. It’s a shame SlideShare is a rarity. Maybe 2008?

There are so many reasons why people want to require registration, with it mostly coming down to control. Making an account is something I do after I have sampled what you have to offer. The more of a sample you give me, the better.

It’s another version of the freemium model. Before you pay with your time to register, you should have the opportunity to test things out.

Way to go, SlideShare. Way to be optional!

I’ve noticed a few books and magazines lately doing something truly useful with their cover and jacket blurbs. They tell you which page to turn to.

Made to Stick lists some topics, then invites you to open the book to a page where you’ll find an example of the topic. Where I might read the jacket of most books and then put them down, this one dares me to investigate. It gives me a path of least resistance.

This Kiplinger’s cover does the same thing. Rather than just plaster the front with headlines, which requires searching for the table of contents, they give you the page number.

It’s such an obvious method, I’m not sure why other publishers don’t do it. When I see an article that interests me and I know I can turn directly to it, I am engaging with the book or magazine. Who wouldn’t want that? An engaged reader is more likely to buy and is a better sell for the ads (in the case of a magazine).

Why make them remain lost? Why not point them in a few directions and take a chance at engaging them? And all you have to do it put a little number next to a blurb or headline you’re already writing.

To convert this lesson to something usable on the web, see The Page Paradigm.