• An overload of choices make decision-making much more difficult since our pre-frontal cortex can only handle a small number of choices at a time (somewhere between 5 and 12)
• Several experiments suggest that emotion is a critical ingredient to enable fast decision making and prevent analysis paralysis.

Of course, Jonah Lehrer is not the first person to cover this topic. I remember reading Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice a couple of years ago, and it included references to similar ideas.

What intrigues and concerns me is the implication of this research for business intelligence.  It would suggest that:

• Additional data / information can lead people (and hence companies) astray while they assume that more data is always better.  A lot of work has been done in this area.  I vaguely remember reading about such research in a Malcolm Gladwell-genre book.
• If people are making decisions based on data that may not be relevant, then we are, yet again, underestimating the role of randomness in the success or failure of companies (and CEO’s).  Someone else recently wrote about this, but I do not recall who.
• Emotion is a critical ingredient of important decision making; however, emotion can be significantly influenced by many other factors than data.  This suggestion in turn begs the question: just how important / relevant is the data?  Is it more often used for rationalizing emotional decisions than it is used for arriving at rational decisions?

While businesses will continue to move towards being run more and more by data, research like this heightens the importance of the non-technical parts of a good business intelligence implementation – understanding the data that you have available, truly understanding what you’re measuring, how it may impact the business and of course good data  visualization in the final implementation.

PS. The title of this blog post refers to the difficulty the author, Jonah Lehrer, has in picking cereal due to the vast number of choices available.

A friend recently showed me a demo of a product idea that he’s been playing with that brings a physical world interface to the iPhone via its touch / gesture capabilities. What truly struck me during the demo was not how useful the feature was in itself, but rather the value of the action going from being an abstract action (i.e. mouse motion / click translated into a visual representation on the monitor) to a physical action again – something that you touch and interact with ( you can’t feel the texture – yet!).

Many have talked about the advantage of a physical book over the many e-versions that we have seen over the years. And of course, simply mimicking the act of turning a page with a gesture on the iPhone screen does not dramatically change the user experience of reading. However, gestures on the iPhone (and other similar touch interfaces) do get one step closer to the physical world that we are used to and for certain applications, that will be good enough for success.

Given that users who are not tech savvy often type search queries into the URL bar, I always wondered what the value was of the URL bar. Clearly, their intention was not to go to the specific URL (unique resource locator) but rather to find out what other information there is on what they typed in. Similarly, as a tech savvy user, I rarely type in URL’s other than for a few often-used sites that I expect my browser to auto-complete. In almost every case, I search instead since I’m never sure what domain a company is using (often, due to domain name squatters). Usually, I find my desired link in the first page of search results.

My follow-up question has been – why not get rid of the URL bar and only provide a search bar? Seems that Google Chrome finally does that.

Example of a word typed into the Google Chrome Address Bar (source: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95440&hl=en)

Search queries and results are listed in line with the potential domain names that could match your query. Hopefully, Firefox 3′s AwesomeBar will provide similar functionality sometime soon (maybe another FF plugin already does?). And if there is broad adoption of Google Chrome, can we hope that the value of typo domain names and squatted domain names will decline?

I acknowledge the obvious value to Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) of additional traffic and searches; I infinitely prefer that option to the current state of affairs.

Hopefully, we’ll see more of these readers across all types of businesses, unless of course we all change to RFID-based cash transaction systems first.

The online version has a UI innovation that I loved: the ability to leave comments inline with the text. I often find it quite distracting to scroll between comments and the main text when reading some online publication formats. And in this case, a wiki was not an appropriate format in which to publish a book.

Instead, the site allows users to click on the left side bar, which changes to a slightly darker shade of green when you hover over it. Click on the sidebar and a comment box pops up. If comments had already been left, then you see a little callout indicating the number of comments that have been left around a particular paragraph. I believe the authors used this facility extensively while their book was in “beta” to get feedback and errata from users.

The AJAX pop-up lets you read others comments as well as post new comments:

I noticed the little ‘+’ link in the upper right-hand corner of the pop-up (something that I haven’t noticed before). That click resulted in a much larger pop-up:

The pop-up provides much more detail such as open / close times, major credit cards accepted, reviews, etc. and most importantly, presents that information in the context of the task that I am doing. Instead of taking me to a different screen or requiring me to do a separate search, everything is in one place with a clean tabbed interface. A good example of some data cleansing and structuring, combined with an understanding of the user task, delivered using new web technology.

Information delivery in the context of a task, with a more structured user interface, is a significant step forward from traditional keyword search for many common information tasks. Hopefully, Google will choose to apply these ideas to additional types of searches.