Paralysis through Explosion of Choice

Nice (and quite humorous) talk here by sociology professor Barry Schwartz about the flipside of the long-tail-maximizing-freedom-of-choice paradigm. His point is that traditionally it was possible to chose from a very limited number of options for a given situation, whereas today in affluent societies the choice is becoming almost unlimited. E.g. to chose from 5 different kinds of salad dressing is simple, but to chose from 500 is hard. And even when a choice is made, the nagging thought of the opportunity costs of all those other choices (wouldn't dressing X or Y have been even better) decreases the level of happiness / satisfaction one experiences.

Translated to user interface design I think this makes a good point of limiting the choices the user has to make at any given point in the navigation to a few items, that of course need to be relevant to that user at that point. Personalization is key to that, but also working with concepts / assumptions of what most likely it is that the user wants / is looking for in a given context.