Sometimes, choices can be overwhelming. Consider going to the
hardware store in search of paint for your house.
Standing in the paint aisle looking at the unbelievable number of
vendors and paint colors could be enough to send you packing without paint, leaving
your house to flake apart bit by bit. Sheena Iyengar, in her TED talk “How
to Make Choosing Easier”, proposes four methods to make choosing less painful
for people. First, she introduces the fact that less is more and some choices
should be eliminated before introducing them to a decision maker. Second, she
discusses linking the consequences of our choices to our emotions. Third, she
claims that grouping choices into categories that make sense to the users helps
people make decisions. Finally, group choices together, starting with few
choices and gradually increasing the amount of choices in each subsequent
group.
Cutting choices is something that I have learned to do in my
professional life when scheduling training sessions for faculty. If you schedule
them, they will come! When I offer too many training sessions, I inevitably end
up with some sessions that only have one person and others where I have 8 or
more. So I have learned to schedule sessions based on how many participants I
have to train. I am sure to have plenty of sessions to include all and then add
one or two more for convenience of rescheduling. Otherwise, there are too many
choices for instructors and too many sessions to decide which trainers to
schedule. From an organizational standpoint, you want to have plenty of
sessions for instructors to chose from. From a personal standpoint, having to
do the same thing 20 times is less appealing than doing it 10 times. Limiting
the number of training sessions frees my time to concentrate on other types of
training and special projects.
It is currently very difficult to find information in ERNIE. Recently,
the Worldwide Web Services team made the decision to revamp all of the
Worldwide pages and make them more user friendly. The first step to this
process was organizing the Student Services tab. They wanted to categorize the
links on this tab to better serve the needs of students. Therefore, they
conducted a usability test, a survey type instrument that asks users where they
would look for certain pieces of information. The results of this test allowed
the team to decide which categories made the most sense to users and which
links to include under each category. The organization needs categorization
like this on the website to improve the users’ experience. This has been
beneficial to my department as well. Our EagleVision information is now easier
to find and more accessible to those who need it. I anxiously await the
improvements to the rest of the site.
I agree with the techniques that Ms. Iyengar proposes. I think that
another way to improve one’s decision-making is to inform oneself about the
choices and consequences of a particular decision. I find that researching a
topic, both by consulting with others who have experience with a similar issue
and by searching for information on the Internet, I tend to make better decisions. Decisions will never be perfect in every situation; however,
employing some of the methods that Ms. Iyengar proposes will eliminate many of
the troubles associated with making decisions.
Reference:
Iyengar, S. (Performer) (2012). Sheena iyengar: How to make choosing easier
[Web]. Retrieved from
http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose.html
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