I see a lot of decisionmaking especially as it's foisted on the public in commercial choices to be largely
false alternatives.
That is, there are a large number of options presented, under the guise of "choice is good", for which the ultimate effects of the outcome are "it doesn't matter".
The choices are also often not presented in a way that makes discriminating between alternatives straightforward. I'm reminded of a financial news program whose sponsor for a time was a credit card company bragging about "over 3,000 choices for consumers" in credit card options. That is, frankly, stupidly excessive.
But there are ways to present choices in a way which offers a very high level of tailoring of options without overwhelming the user with those options. I like to use the example of automobile heating/cooling controls common in the 1980s-1990s (the tendency toward thermostatic controls is changing this now).
For American car manufacturers, the preferred style was a heat control lever which went from low to high, a fan switch, usually with "flow", "lo", "med" ,and "hi" settings, and a vent + AC selector. This would allow for dash, floor, or defrost vents to be selected, as well as another addition set of vent settings in which AC was enabled. The presentation always struck me as confusing, and there were a number of vent/AC settings which weren't reachable.
This is pretty typical: http://www.autopartsdb.net/images/productimg/C/CX1884.JPG
Imports from Japan and Europe typically had four controls: a fan switch, a heat slider or dial, and a vent selector, plus an independent AC control. The method seemed a lot more sensible to me: are you hot (turn up the heat) or cold (turn on the AC), how much air do you want flowing (fan) and where do you want it (vent selector). Figuring out how to set the controls always seemed far more intuitive to me than the American controls.
Typical: http://www.autoecu.com/images/ebay/01%20-%2007%20TOYOTA%20HI...
One more recent modification is that often the AC is automatically activated (and sometimes cannot be deactivated) when defrost is selected, as the humidity reduction tends to improve defrost performance.
There's a similar design issue I've noticed particularly with clothes washers, where one style seems to specify the type of article you're washing: "knits", "delicates", "colors", "whites", and the other the specific wash conditions you want: water temperature, a
See: http://content.aolstatic.net/ProductImages/rvLarge/ZWG6141P_... (article descriptions)
vs. load size, temperature, options, and agitator settings: http://www.ajmadison.com/ajmadison/images/large/GTWP1800DWW_...
My observation is that I know the settings I want to apply, and where "outcomes" controls are specified, I've got to translate these into the settings I hope to achieve. What I prefer are options which allow me to select for settings, preferably along a range (e.g., heater intensity, fan power).
Another point is that in consumer goods, the distinctions between products very nearly always simply doesn't matter.
In a Starbucks world, there's a coffee roaster I love which has an exceptionally simple product line. Light roast. Dark roast. Regular. Decaffinated. And you can get your beans whole or ground if you like. But basically four choices. The beans are, of course, excellent.
I've elected for choice in many food purchases by avoiding mainstream grocery stores (the news late this week of P&G killing off a bunch of brands strikes me as comically irrelevant). While I've fewer "options" than MegaMonSantoFoods when shopping at Trader Joes, what I do have are generally simpler, less expensive, less processed, and healthier products. I've long since abandoned prepared breakfast cereals for oats (and add my own nuts, dried fruit, or other ingredients as I prefer). Fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, dairy, and eggs are generally non-branded. Store products for cleaning, or vinegar and baking soda (both of which are surprisingly difficult to find in straighforward bulk forms) work fine. And the costs are lower.
My personal sense is that branding jumped the shark somewhere in the 1970s to 1980s, though we're only just starting to be aware of this in a broader sense.
