More is less

I just watched this video The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less from a talk the speaker Barry Schwartz gave at Google. I have to admit this was a much better experience than the talk here at Google NY that I went to last month.

Anyways, so this video has really set my mind racing, it's actually one of those rare occasions when you can see a theory relating so directly with life. The speaker talks about why more & more choices are weighing people down with a heavy cognitive load in terms of deciding between all the options, why affluent societies are experiencing more unhappiness than ever before, why striving for the best next gadget or the best address in town is so self-defeating....

But aside from the philosophical overtones of less consumption & simple living which will never lose their appeal for me, there's a lot of food for thought here:

• as digital designers, there is a whole lot we can do for users here: not just by creating simpler, meaningful products rather than falling into the trap of feature-bloat, but also by practising a concept this speaker cites, namely libertarian paternalism. In simpler terms, it means that we as application designers can make choices for users that are in their best interest, at the same time giving them the choice to reverse it. The theory ( & practice too) goes that people are likely to stay with the decision you have made anyway, but would have been confounded had they been given a choice. Is this true for you, or would you rather have every choice offered to you so that you can actively choose one?
• Professor Schwartz also talks about the concept of the agent playing a very important role in shielding the customer/ client from the burden of choice; the agent picks a single or small number of choices from the vast array available. This brings to mind the great job the small pop-and-mom grocery stores in India do for their customers: unlike walking through aisles full of similar products as one does in a typical American supermarket, I can just call up my kirana store asking for the best deals in say cooking oils or in laundry detergent; he quickly offers 2 or 3 of the best choices I have, & the job is done. When you couple that with totally personalised service (delivering the stuff to my doorstep, no matter what the value of the total order; always greeting me as bhabhiji, a very sweet Hindi word that means sister-in-law), it is not hard to see why these kirana stores will survive & thrive in India, despite all the fears of big business houses joining hands with American retail giants to take over the Indian retail market.
• The recent explosive growth of India & China is seeing unprecedented waves of consumerism engulfing these places. In fact, to paraphrase Kaushik Basu's recent article on the BBC website, on a trip to China & then India, he is astounded by the huge consumption trip these two countries ( at least the urban areas) are on. He jokes that it would appear in comparison that to get away from the vast-scale consumerism, one would need to go west, to Europe & America!
  I myself have sensed this on my recent trips to India: a craving for the best brands, the latest gadgets, the flashiest car & home. Weddings & even birthdays warrant conspicuous displays of wealth. The sprouting of the umpteenth shopping mall still has people all agog with excitement. Restaurants are always full, even the expensive ones ( By the way, most of them are, expensive that is. The boom is digging deep into the average Indian's pocket, just as medical tourism has resulted in locals paying three to four times what they earlier paid for basic services such as blood tests & xrays.

Let me what you think about all this!

Defining who/what you are, & more importantly, what you are not

FoundIt has evolved, a little at a time, but based on my own fascination with helping to get to information when we need it. The problems now are problems of plenty: there is too much information even on our own computers, & a lot of what we do everyday may be easily avoided, if only we remembered that we had done this before, & have the stuff somewhere.

So the current FoundIt you see now is one that has grown organically out of our understanding & experiences with managing information,as well as what some early user surveys revealed. But this version is still an underpainting. Those of you not familiar with this term, an underpainting comprises the initial broad strokes that a painter puts on the canvas, to essentially map out masses & tones on the canvas, oftentimes using a single color such as sepia or a yellow ochre. This is a great means to break down all the decisions that go into a painting into manageable, distinguishable ones. Once the artist is happy with what he sees in the underpainting, she can start to put in more detail & volume & color.

So with FoundIt, the underpainting is in place. The way we hope to develop FoundIt is organically, based on your experiences & what you'd like to see the application do. I see the latest issue of Time magazine has 'You' as Person of the Year, because well, you control the information age. This isn't really as ridiculous as it sounds at first. There has been a huge shakedown of a lot of institutions in the last year or two: big media, publishing, social software that makes ordinary people capable of contributing to & being heard in a way never seen before. And as a designer, I do believe that the best applications need to be made from the inside out, growing & developing based on actual needs & experiences. So FoundIt will continue its goal of an application that brings your key information to the forefront, just in time, every time.

And equally we have to be clear about what we will not be. In the recent weeks that we have been promoting FoundIt with various groups/ people, blogs, we have heard back from a Venture Capitalist or two that they are interested only in funding social software. That's interesting but oddly, we had gotten in touch with them because they are avid bloggers & not because we were looking for VC money. But it certainly got me thinking that if one did need a lot of money to get up & running, one would spend not only a lot of time & energy in other activities such as writing business plans & making ridiculous 5 year forecasts, but that one would also be under immense pressure to alter the complexion & nature of the product. We are more than willing to shape this & other products based on user feedback; but to have a financier twist you out of shape simply because everyone in their tribe is looking to birth the next YouTube or MySpace is absurd. At least to me. And thankfully for us, we do not need millions of dollars to bring our ideas to fruition.

And so we will continue down the path of organic, evolutionary growth.

Download FoundIt now!

We are now offering FoundIt beta free to download. Some links of interest:

What is FoundIt [Download available from the right column of this same page]

Product Tour

This is just the beginning. We aim to explore exciting ideas in interface design for information retrieval, as also bringing meaningful information to you the user. So try FoundIt, & send us your feedback.

FoundIt beta is ready for release!!!

We are very excited to be releasing FoundIt(beta) for you to try out. FoundIt is a web-based application that gives you a bird's eye-view of all the files & documents on your computer. In addition it allows you to tag & chunk content for easier retrieval & re-use.

So check out the FoundIt page & sign up to try FoundIt.

Breath of fresh air

In the humdrum of everyday work, there come those moments when one breathes deep & full, those moments when one sees exciting, adventurous work. Such a moment came for me today watching a documentary on Frank Gehry's work on PBS ( BTW, this wonderful channel amidst the crap that goes in the name of entertainment TV channels has given me & my family so many wonderful moments, I owe it big!). His process, his inspiration, and his amazing work: this documentary covered it beautifully. Gehry says his desire to build what he builds now-- in my view, some of his structures look like a child has randomly arranged blocks, sometimes a little awkwardly, so that the viewer gasps at the possibility of one of the blocks tipping over---emanated from a childhood spent building fantastic creations out of left-over wood-blocks that his grandmother would bring in. His Bilbao museum is stunning in the way the burnished metallic shapes melt & flow one moment, stand uptight & rigid the next. The way the earthy browns combined with the blue reflections in the glass walls took my breath away.


I also loved the kind of loose process he has - he sits back, while his assistants add another twisted piece of paper to the model at Gehry's bidding, only to have him make them rearrange it; or when asked why he says he likes a shape, or what materials he will finally use, his answer is very often "I don't know yet".

For me personally, the challenge is to see how I can combine my passions for painting with my work in interface & interaction design. I don't know how I am going to tackle this one, not yet anyway, but I do know that the idea has been brewing in my head for a while.