So you want to buy an Asus wifi router?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus/asus-routers/pcmcat29320005...

Enjoy your paralysis.

"Sort By -> Customer Rating" is a very helpful filter I usually start with.

And then you get this view:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?browsedCategory=a...

Lots of enormous corporations are desperately incompetent at various things; that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to ask for competence. In this case, perhaps Best Buy was very good at selling electronics before the Web became a primary way to shop for products, and never managed to make the transition effectively. It happens all the times.

You'd need to get all hands on deck, every month or so, to manually go through the whole store and look for data defects. And have them rotate who looks at which parts every time. You can't automate it, because the failure case is essentially, "It looks wrong." In theory, it's worth the effort, in practice, nobody does it.

Well, unless you're apple and you can make your own stores, but still - they sell through Best Buy too.

Certainly not an easy game, and definitely a tedious one. I know I'd hate to be on the team tasked with figuring that one out.

A similar thing happens in video games. Many developers get feedback from users and UX people that too many options are bad. THey then remove the COMPLETELY, which should not make any sense. Even a small submenu somewhere to enable advanced settings is fine, but removing them? Why?

Nobody goes out to buy an Asus router. They just go out to buy a router, and Asus can't stop them from being flooded with options. By some stroke of fate, Apple can.

When the market's large enough, you can get by by offering so many options that a bunch of people naturally take you up on some of them enough to maintain a profit, or you can offer a small selection of very quality items that continually please. I know which one I prefer.

If you have a single page menu, it usually means some very careful thought went into what went on that menu. And like others have said, those places are turning people away due to lack of choice, so if they continue to be in business with a small menu, it's usually a sign of good food. Or really great marketing/atmosphere ;)

At the other end are the Vietnamese restaurants with 2 pages of soup where English-language names are "soup with noodles and pork" for like 4 different items.

As a consumer, I need a 256GB SSD and 16GB ram. My only choice is to spend $2000 on other macbook pro features I don't need. When I went with a custom PC builder instead (lots of choices - first pick the chassis, then pick the CPU, then pick the RAM, then pick the disk), I got what I needed for $1300.

I don't often bill out at $700/hour (probably the total time I spent on this choice), so Apple's lack of choice certainly wouldn't have helped me.

- Consumer A already chose what she wants, and she just needs to find it out. - Consumer B knows her preferences, but she needs to make the choice. - Consumer C is not aware of which attributes are important in the decision process.

You are a consumer A, so this simplification did not help YOU. It did help consumers B and consumer C.

http://www.hyperlabs.net/ergonomia/presentazioni/euroia11/ the slides of my presentation at Euro IA 2011: Designing Interactions that Help Customers in Decision Making

I'm all for assisting Consumer C by way of tools like Consumer Reports, and modern evolutions of the same notion of helping fill information gaps. But I rail against the idea that choices should be eliminated to curtail the stress of Consumer C.

No surprise: I am not an Apple consumer. In fact, I routinely write about how every technology company is not yet making the devices and technologies I want in my life (e.g., [1]). Choice is absolutely not hurting progress toward my ideal, though. Choice is, along with purchasing power and my (small) voice, among the few forces that allow me to exert a proportionate "steering" effect on the industry.

Studying the purported satisfaction gap of Consumer C versus the free market and concluding—as the very title of the article does—that it is definitely "stressing us [all] out" rings of thinly-veiled authoritarianism. And that is bad. Luckily for me, for the time being, many manufacturers and vendors have elected to (mostly) ignore these researchers. For example, most of the US food industry continues to give me a broad spectrum of choices from everything from breakfast cereal, to iced tea, to ice cream. I hope their own market research has revealed the combined voices of Consumer A & B are too loud to suppress in an ill-advised effort to satisfy C. Help guide C, but don't assume A & B do not exist.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

OP used Apple as an example so let's stick with it. If someone wants to buy a laptop to browse the internet, use e-mail, organize photos etc. they learn very quickly that MacBook Air is for them. Then they need to pick a screen size (11" or 13"), decide if they need more storage than in the base model and they're done. Apple is essentially a curator, which is a very valuable service. But we would be much worse off if we only had Apple clones on the market.

People around here know much more about computers and smartphones than an average consumer so these examples are not convincing. But consider microwave ovens. Recently I had a displeasure to look for a new one. If some company decided to scrap their entire line and settle on two or three base models with clear differences between each, it would be a great benefit to many costumers.

From the article:

"...too many options create anxiety and leave us less satisfied. Could one answer lie in a return to the state monopolies of old?"

"consider jeans. Once there was only one kind, says Schwartz – the ill-fitting sort that, fingers-crossed, would get less ill-fitting once he wore and washed them repeatedly. Now, what with all the options (stone-washed, straight-leg, boot-fit, distressed, zip fly, button fly, slightly distressed, very distressed, knee-holed, thigh-holed, knee and thigh-holed, pretty much all holes and negligible denim), Schwartz feels entitled to expect that there is a perfect pair of jeans for him. Inevitably, though, when he leaves the store, he is likely to be less satisfied now than when there were hardly any options."

"Corbyn’s political philosophy suggests, what we need is not more choice, but less; not more competition but more monopolies."

This goes on and on. However, unless a company makes X''' that has every feature available in the known universe, I have no shot of finding what I really want/need.

This also boils down to good advice I got long ago. Buy once, cry once. Meaning: do you research, determine what you need and buy that thing, not the entry level thing.

Technical people like to pretend it's the easiest thing in the world to "know" how much computer someone needs and to buy it. But if you're non-technical, all you hear is technical people saying "trust me". Which is precisely the same thing Apple is saying.

And, yes, we show them lower sticker prices. But Apple has a far better track record of delivering customer satisfaction than technical people recommending beige boxes. So, for anyone with the money, why in the world would they care for two seconds about "too much computer"?

"Aww shucks. I bought too much computer and loved it, instead of listening to the geeks, getting just enough, and hating it."

The difference between a $500 laptop and a $1000 laptop can be astounding. I suspect many purchasers of the cheaper laptop will regret it, where the purchasers of a $1000 laptop will have a more powerful, better built computer that might last them longer.

(And in fact, with laptops at least, some cheaper laptops are "more powerful" because they're thicker and heavier; and the expense of the faster components further contributes to their poor build quality. Many more-expensive laptops put more money into thoughtful design, rather than "Spec competitions" and you get a slightly-slower, longer-lasting one. Compare cheap Android phones to flagship ones, for example.

-------------------------

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-ri...

As other commenters have noted, this benefits Apple more than the average consumer. They can offer one or a couple of options, overprice them, and make a lot of money. Ideally, on such a big purchase (although for mobile devices a lot of the cost is not immediately apparent because you pay comparatively little upfront), someone would seek to reduce their choices by doing research on the various options available and deciding which would work best for them. For the monitor example, first filter by screen size, then filter by resolution, then connectors available, etc. for all the features that are important in that case. The options that are left are the best options available in the judgement of the person making the purchase, and then the decision between a handful of options becomes much easier. They can save money by getting only what they want.

Quickly deciding for or against just the one option benefits Apple the most. You end up trading money for ease of choice. I for one would rather keep my money in exchange for extra research, but it seems today's culture has an extreme phobia of stress (which is a whole other dicussion in itself).

When I think about the quality of a shitty Dell, HP, ASUS (enter your choice of brand here) laptop computer that can be bought at 1/2 the price of an Apple product, and how it will probably have a totally dead battery in a year. And that half the keys on the keyboard won't work. And the hinges for the monitor will be close to severing. And that I will have had to hack together a *NIX environment that sort of functions 50% of the time. And that the trackpad will suck. And it goes on.

I will gladly pay for Apple doing the work for me, giving me a machine that will last for literally years without fail, getting me a solid dev environment from day 1 with little to none of my time and effort spent.

Apple has only one monitor, and it is clearly out of date (not ultra resolution, not of same body type as current Apple products). So I quickly figure out I don't want it with no stress.

I am more likely to buy a Dell monitor. But I would be even more likely if the website was more oriented to the task of telling me which monitors are current in each class.

Small nitpick: the Mac Pro series didn’t exist until Apple switched over from PowerPC processors to Intel in 2006. What you meant were the PowerBook and Power Mac machines.