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The paradox of choice: an interview with Barry Schwartz

Jared Spool has published an interview with Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice. To quote:

Then this psychologist at Columbia did a study when she was a graduate student at Stanford that's now become quite famous, the jam study, that showed when you present 30 flavors of jam at a gourmet food store, you get more interest but less purchasing than when you only show six flavors of jam. All of a sudden, it became an issue, or at least a possibility, that adding options could actually decrease the likelihood that people would actually choose any of them. More and more, because of that study, people have actually tried to study it in the wild, in the field, by getting companies to vary the variety that they offer and tracking both purchasing and also satisfaction. So that's starting to happen, but there are not very many papers that are actually published on that. This whole line of work is only about five years old.

Posted by jamesr on August 29, 2006 03:53 PM
Categories: Information architecture, Usability & user-centered design