Sometimes fewer choices is better
Joel's speech at the DevDays conferences is about how "making choices" makes people unhappy, particularly in software.
I've written before about why it's better to have just a few choices rather than a lot, but sometimes having no choice at all is best.
Case in point: The definition of "Goal Value."
A "goal" is a significant, useful event during the marketing or sales process. It could be getting to a certain page, downloading a file, watching a demo video, filling out a form, sending out an estimate. And, best of all, taking someone's money!
But it's not enough to just say "You reached a goal," because not all goals are equally valuable. Getting to the download page is significant and worth something, but having the download form filled out with valid email address is worth more.
So we have the concept of "goal value" as a unit-less number. You set it to some relative value, e.g. something of value 3 is half as valuable as something of value 6. It doesn't matter what the unit is.
But I have a suggestion for what the unit should be: Money. Dollars, Euros, whatever. I won't rehash why this is better (read the previous post).
But I didn't want to force my view of "goal value" onto the user. Maybe you don't like the idea of money, for whatever reason. You should be able to choose what the unit is, or that it isn't anything.
Today, though, you'll notice that the "value" field is no longer unit-less. There's a little dollar sign there, with instructions below that you have to consider this as money. (Yes there's also a new configuration option to switch the unit of currency to something else.)
Why do this? Why eliminate the option? Why force my ideas down my user's throats?
Because sometimes choice is bad. Without forcing the issue, the user has to decide:
- Should I use money or not? Assuming not...
- Should I pick "1" as the "base unit?" But what if that turns out to be wrong?
- How many decimal places should I be concerned with?
- Later, when I have more data, how will I know if my relative units are accurate?
Here's the punch line: None of these choices will improve your business. This is an irrelevant distraction. A distraction created by this tool. Tools are supposed to illuminate, not distract. They are supposed to aid you in decisions about your business, not create brand new decision points.
So, since this "freedom of unit choice" doesn't actually help you, and since using currency has advantages, you don't get the choice.
You have to be careful about this rule of course. Sometimes forcing your view of "how things should work" results in an inferior product that really does hurt productivity, like Mac people being denied the convenience of the right mouse button for 20 years.
But when the choice really doesn't matter, don't have a choice.
P.S. In this particular case, it's not even that limiting because you could just choose to ignore the dollar sign! But then again, why ignore it? Which is the point...