I’ve recently watched one of the greatest TED’s videos called The Paradox of Choice.
It defently becomes very difficult to make a decision and it is not only related to buying things, but also software development and other aspects of life.
Let’s for example take software development:
1. Management - Classic approach, Agile(SCRUM, XP), RUP and other iterative (and not only) methodologies
2. Coding - tons of patterns and approaches, a lot of universal programming languages
As it was mentioned in the video - knowledge can not be complete and holistic. So we need to make assumptions, trust someone (average like/don like as it is done in Amazon or other resources) or apply other criterias to make decision making easier.
To make myself clear let’s imagine two situations:
1. You want to buy a car and you come to a place with 100 cars. All cars are in a similar price range. The only thing you have is some technical information for each car.
2. In other situation everything is the same as in one above, BUT! Before comming to that place you had a chance to discuss your potential purchace with similar car users on Facebook (they would share their own experience of usage and etc.), gather different information from possibble “experts” (well, you can’t be 100% sure :)) and so on…
At least for me it is obvious that for average person in the world it is easier to make a decision based on average (or the most common) opinion. That’s why tagging, groups in social networks, products linking (people who like this like that), websites that compare different products are so popular.
What else can be invented to help people make their choice?…