The Fewer The Better
Hot Mobile News
Toyota Motor Corp. said it has developed a mobile phone with KDDI Corp. that will make it easier for drivers in Japan to use its car navigation and other services. The phone, called “TiMO”, will go on sale at the end of October and will be sold only at the automaker’s 7,500 outlets in Japan.
Ryanair plans to allow passengers mobile access to voice and text communications on all of its flights from the middle of 2007. The budget airline announced on Wednesday that it will partner with OnAir, an Airbus and Sita joint in-flight communications venture, which plans to fit the entire Ryanair fleet with technology called Mobile OnAir. Initially fifty aircraft will be equipped by mid-2007, with further installations following.
The Fewer The Better (TFTB) is a piece of advice that keeps popping up. It has been proposed for a whole variety of situations if you check with Google. Here are just a few where the phrase TFTB appears:
There’s even a rock band with that name.
The notion clearly stems from the same idea as the KISS (Keep It Simple, Simon) principle. The KISS principle seems to have a positive spin on it. However TFTB often seems to have a somewhat negative slant to it. The Fewer, The Better sounds like a call for self-discipline and doing without. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fewer really is better.
This is highlighted by a recent interview that Jared Spool had with Barry Schwartz. This is not the Barry Schwartz who founded the SE Roundtable and is the author of the Cartoon Barry Blog bringing news on Search Engine matters. This Barry Schwartz is the author of “The Paradox of Choice“, and is a professor at Swarthmore College. He’s into the same phenomenon that Sheena Iyengar, an associate professor of management at Columbia University’s business school, calls ‘choice overload‘. She was the author of that 401(k) Plan study above. Too many options will either paralyse the chooser or may mean an unsatisfactory choice is made to get out of the choice dilemma. Once more it seems the fewer, the better.
It is interesting that the Barry Schwartz interview is featured on a website about Usability. Usability is concerned with websites that work. In other words these are websites where visitors will have more satisfying experiences and will more easily achieve their objectives in visiting the website. If you offer too many choices on a web page on where to click to next, then perhaps visitors will jump somewhere else in their frustration.
The fewer the better is certainly a tantalising phrase when considered in terms of mobile devices. Mobile devices clearly transmit less information. The creator of a mobile website must think carefully how to use the more limited screen space that is available. Can the user experience be in any way comparable to that seen when using a desktop computer? Barry Schwartz’s argument would suggest that we should not jump to the obvious conclusion. Perhaps the mobile device in delivering fewer choices may help us get better results. Perhaps fewer is better, particularly when you’re on the go.
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BPWrap
September 13th, 2006 at 12:12 am
[...] The Fewer The Better? that’s what Barry Welford says. Is the web experience actually enhanced by the scaling-down necessary for display on mobile devices? [...]
September 13th, 2006 at 11:54 am
[...] The second-click-through award goes to Barry Welford at StayGoLinks for “The Fewer, The Better” because, first, Mr. Welford usually has interesting things to say; and, second, I am always looking for website design insights. In this case, he’s talking about trimming options on websites, to make a visitor’s choice of which link to click easier. [...]
September 23rd, 2006 at 11:04 am
[...] Choice overload [...]
February 14th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Hi – Slightly off topic, but where do you get the ‘Hot Mobile News’ content from?
February 15th, 2009 at 7:59 am
Hot Mobile News comes from scanning news feeds for appropriate items.
February 15th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Thanks – I thought it might come from a specific RSS feed.
April 28th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I’e never heard of TFTB acronym before – although the principle is a brilliant application I do agree that TFTB has a far bigger negative conentation to it than the KISS acronym.
Got he KISS…