This is a TEDtalks from 2006 which I only found over the weekend.

I found it really enjoyable and there are lots of useful learnings for user interface / application design. Barry talks about the implications of a growing number of choices (giving us freedom) and where responsibility for making those choices now sits. He goes on to talk about how the number of choices impacts your level of satisfaction level after having made a choice.

It definitely made me think about how you deliver choices to users in applications, how many to give on a given page both to maximise their ability to make a choice (avoiding the paralysis of having too many) and also their feeling of satisfaction after having made it. For me this means your application has to know a lot about the user and then use that to serve up a limit number of useful choices to support them in achieving their goal. Easy peasy!

Lets see what difference that makes to True North applications in future.