If you’ve ever felt like you spent more time picking out a film to watch online than the time you spent watching the actual film, you’re not alone. Everyone has had this problem before.
And it isn’t limited to movies either. Finding a song to listen to on Spotify, picking a book to read off of Amazon’s endless search results, or sifting through the mountain of reviews and ratings on yelp are all places we encounter option overload.
But it’s not our fault.
The fact that we find it difficult to make a decision isn’t because we’re naturally indecisive. We make decisions every day, both big and small. The problem is in the tools we use.
There is a fundamental belief (particularly in the West) that having more options is always good. Some part of this is likely due to how we associate the idea of choice with the concept of freedom. Choice means having control of our lives and being able to seek out any experience we desire. This means that any limit to our choice in any way threatens our sense of personal freedom.
But more (perceived) choice does not always equal more freedom. In fact, too much choice can actually reduce our sense of personal agency.
However, the belief in limitless choice has seemingly become the guiding philosophy of many major consumer tech companies. The marketing arms race to claim that their company has more movies, more music, or more products than their competition has enticed customers. These customers wander in looking for more choice, only to find themselves trapped under the weight of those options. They go from choosers to pickers.
But isn’t choosing and picking the same thing? Not quite.
It’s true that both have to do with making a decision, but it’s from there the two concepts start to diverge.
Choosing is about the individual being able to determine their own destiny how they see fit.
Picking is when the individual is free to make any decision they want within the parameters set by an outside source.
Choosing empowers the decision maker.
Picking disempowers them.
To illustrate the difference in these concepts, we’ll look at our Netflix experience. When we signed up for the service we saw it as a way of expanding our choices. A massive library of films and TV shows that we could watch at any time. A selection far greater than our personal collections and anything we’d find at our local video store. There can be no denying that a subscription to the service increased our options.
That refreshing feeling of freedom purchased for $9.99 a month quickly subsides once we log in. When Netflix actually delivers on its promise of seemingly endless content, the burden of having to find something falls on us. This is where choosers become pickers.
Unless we know what we want to want to watch when we begin, we are tasked with answering that question based on the tools Netflix provides. The two most important ones are filters and recommendations.
Filters offer ways to divide and conquer too much information. Breaking down your viewing options by rating or genre can help reduce the overwhelming feeling of too many options. Unfortunately, when you have a massive library like Netflix, simple filtering is still going to leave you with way too many choices. Beyond that, if you want to start applying more filters to your results you need to have a better idea of what you’re interested in watching. If you didn’t know what you wanted to watch in the first place are you really going to have that good an idea of what type of movie you want to see? Maybe, but the need to have some vague notion of your interests before you can make filters passably useful makes them a poor tool to help you choose.
Recommendations are a step in the right direction, but they fail in the context of this scenario. If recommendations are coming from someone we trust they’re great. Next to having an idea yourself, a recommendation (or suggestion) is the easiest way to make a decision. Unfortunately, suggestions from algorithms (no matter how sophisticated) suffer from our unconscious (or conscious) bias for human endorsements.
We get recommendations every day. From friends, family, and even strangers. But nowhere do we get them more than from marketers and advertisers. We’ve talked about this in previous articles, but it comes down to the fact that we’re so used to trying to ignore getting sold to that we’ve become numb to recommendations (even good ones) from anyone except those that have earned our trust. This includes the recommendations we get from our technology like Netflix. It doesn’t matter if the algorithm works, there will always be a part of us that wonders if Netflix has some other motive for the recommendation. It’s that part of us that reduces our trust in the recommendation feature and makes it much harder to make a decision based on it.
The mental fatigue that comes from choosing from too many options without the right tools causes us to either settle or just walk away.
If we walk away all that choice doesn’t matter. If we settle it still doesn’t.
When we settle we’re not making a choice. We’re giving Netflix the power. We’re saying that we’re too tired to search. We’re saying that we accept all of the options Netflix has already presented us (whether they excite us or not). We then pick from whatever we’ve been presented with, and we give up the opportunity to choose from the stuff Netflix hasn’t decided to show us.
We pick our Netflix content, but we don’t choose it.
And picking, as an experience, is far less fulfilling than choosing.
We’re not saying Netflix is a bad product. Giving users lots to choose from is great. The issue is that Netflix isn’t a great solution for how we often use it. If you know what you want to watch, Netflix is great. But if you’re unsure of what you want you’re in trouble.
The job of Netflix is to be able to provide any movie or show you want to watch whenever you might want to watch it.
Your job is to know what to watch.
So what can you do?
Make a list!
We’ve already spoken on the value a list provides in decision making, and it works here too. Start compiling a collection of movies you want to see. Recruit some friends and family for ideas also. You want to pool this information into a singular place you won’t forget about and can easily access.
You want easy access for two reasons. First, you never want it to be a hassle to pull up the list. If it becomes too much work to refer to you’ll just avoid using it and end up back in the old losing routine. Second, you want it on hand for when you come across a great new recommendation. No more wondering what that movie your friend mentioned was because you wrote it down.
Now you’ll know exactly what you want to watch the next time you log in. The list may take a little effort to start, but it will save you a lot of time in the long run. This goes beyond movies too. You can use it with books, music, and more.
There’s nothing better to help you win at Netflix.
Enjoy the show!
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