Why Apple owners are smug and Dell owners are insecure – explained with examples from web design and the jam trade

It’s obvious that choice is the enemy of decisiveness. It’s less well known that choice is the enemy of happiness.

The jam experiment is a popular example among web design gurus. Conducted in 2000, it demonstrated that when offered a choice of 24 jams, people bought fewer than when offered a choice of 6. That’s why, for example, Apple hardly give you any choice at all  – paralysed by the amount of research it takes to choose the best possible Android or RIM handset, customers fall back on spending £200 extra on something that offers you 2 options  – ‘black iPhone’, or ‘white iPhone (coming soon)’.

One of the first things you learn in web page design is that if you give people too many options, they become crippled with indecision and go and look at a video of a kitten on youtube instead.

That isn’t the interesting bit.

The interesting bit comes after people have bought their jam.

It turns out that the people who had more choice thought their jam tasted worse. Even if they chose precisely the same jar of jam as the shopper with fewer choices, they reported enjoying it less. The fear that we’ve bought the wrong kind of jam is enough to tell our tastebuds that we don’t really like what we’re spreading on 0ur toast.

That means a number of things. It explains why Dell users are insecure, Apple users are smug, and people who are total suckers for marketing, and couldn’t make an informed decision if their bank balances depended on it often seem to be the happiest in the world. Until Cockney Dave comes round to break their knees for the compound interest they owe on their Roomba’s.

It means that if Apple offered customers more chances to customise their ridiculous jabscreens, they would actually take less pleasure in them.

And for those of us who work in web design, it means that offering too many options doesn’t just have an impact on conversions. It also means that when your customers have finished shopping, they’ll be less happy with whatever they’ve bought from you.

(And in case you’re wondering, this post was typed on a Dell computer, and Tweeted from an Android Phone).

Has the Internet just killed the Indy – or is 20p the perfect price for a paper?

More details emerged today about the Independent’s so-called ‘sister paper’, i. If the launch is successful, it seems certain that the 20p version will replace the 80p Indy at some point in the next 12 months.

So is this a last, desperate throw of the dice from a once-great(ish) newspaper which now sells only 120,000 copies a day – and the beginning in the UK of a cull of print media like that which the US has seen over the last 2 years?

Or is it a bold experiment in making print media profitable again?

An example from the music industry

For all their bleating about piracy, the thing that really killed the music industry’s profit margins was the single-track download. If you wanted to get your hands on I Wanna Be Your Dog and Passengers in 1997, the only way to do it was to shell out £15 for a Best of Iggy Pop album. To buy 2 tracks you wanted, the music industry insisted on your paying for 13 tracks you probably didn’t.

Today, even if you’re not illegally copying them, you can buy those 2 tracks for £1.50, taking away 90% of the music industry’s profits, and obliging the poor wizened old Iggy to start flogging car insurance.

Yes, it was a terrible advert, but what has that got to do with newspapers?

Newspapers have been playing a similar trick. In 2001, if you wanted to get your TV listings, a Charlie Brooker column, and a match report on Fulham FC vs Ipswich Town, you had to shell out for the Guardian – the whole thing, including lots of stuff you couldn’t care less about. As Clay Shirky points out “Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau.” The advertising and sales on the bits people were actually reading were paying for the things that, it is generally felt, people ought to read.

Nowadays, we pick the bits we want, online, and discard the rest.

If the Independent can reduce itself to 20p of content that people really, really like – if it can discover the unique thing that people are prepared to pay for, it opens a whole world of possibilities, on- and off-line.

That unique-ness, that aspect that 120,000 people every day are prepared to pay 80p for, is something remarkable. It is something that people might also pay for online. It could be an Indy that was the true essence of the Indy, and left all the endless pages of recycled PA stories behind.

It could be a serious newspaper that actually made a profit in the Internet era – and even if it was shorter than the average curry-house menu, that would be a wonderful thing to see.

Charity email fail – so bad, it’s magnificent

“Speak to your customers,” we are told, “as if they were your friends. Tell them stories, engage them, make them understand that you are real.”

One charity has taken this advice a little too much to heart in this fabulous little email, that begins with a threat

“There were some disappointments this time round (which are detailed later in this email)”

And then descends into the kind of idiocy we expect to see in comment threads on Have Your Say, rather than in serious emails by campaigning organisations.

It’s the lack or self-awareness that makes it such a pleasure – they really can’t see why big charities  wouldn’t want to associate their names with a tiny organisation that uses its email address list to have a public sulk. I would guess that the “3 key campaigning organisations” who they are “not attacking”, just “sharing our disappointment” about are Greenpeace, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth .

Anyway, their email has gone viral in the charity world, and so on one measure, it will have been a big success. They can certainly expect a few hundred extra subscribers, waiting to see what they might do next.

What’s your favourite word?

In David Lodge’s effervescent farce Small World, the unspeakable Robin Dempsey gives northern author Ronald Frobisher a computerised analysis of his style.

The angry young novelist’s favourite adjectives, it turns out, are ‘grease’, ‘grime’ and ‘grey’; direct speech for male characters is signalled by a blunt ‘he said’, while women gasp, sigh, whisper urgently, or cry passionately; his female leads have biblical names beginning with the letter ‘R’; and so on. Crippled by this awareness of his own style, Frobisher endures six miserable years of writer’s block.

Small World was written in 1984. I dread to think what would happen to the poor bloke if he had the tools currently available.

Check out, for example, the terrifying Analyze Words, which takes your Twitter feed and tells you how cheery you are.

Might as well just change my handle to @miserableoldman.

There are the ever-present Wordles, which everyone seems to think are just the cutest thing. Except that if you actually wrote most of the copy for the website…

…you find yourself sitting there going ‘Underway? But that’s a horrible word. I can’t possibly be using it that much.” Then you look and you realise that it’s all over the internet, everywhere you’ve ever typed into a CMS.

Hold your nose: it's the Daily Mail's disgusting keyword strategy

In my last job, we had a search engine specialist who would send me lists of keywords to include in titles and URLs of web pages I was writing. I’d put them on Post-It notes,  and stick them to my computer, and the computers of bloggers I edited, as a clear reminder of what we needed to shoehorn into our copy.

I don’t know what the Post-It notes in the Daily Mail office look like, but here is a little taste (bolded in the link) of their keyword strategy:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277769/Fury-job-centre-advertises-phone-sex-workers-willing-pose-naked-webcam.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280783/Lessons-rape-porn-pupils-aged-11.html

The ability to conjure a perfect headline out of mundane events has always been one of the most entertaining and impressive feats of good tabloid journalism.

But there is surely a difference between the art of catching the eye of the passer-by with some bold block capitals and a daft pun, and building a keyword strategy around people who might be typing into google ‘rape porn pupils aged 11′

Can we really say there is a moral element to something as mundane and analytics-focussed as a keyword strategy? Well, it’s not hard to imagine how the Daily Mail might spin the story if they discovered that a rival paper was chasing the kind of readers who might stumble across this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1198485/Rape-abortion-incest-Is-CHILDREN-read.html