blogRecommendation Engine based on “Gut Feelings”?
9 April 2009
A recent blog post, Bijan Sabet’s “Purposefully Constrained”, points out the importance of “simple is better” in achieving successes like Twitter and Google. Reading it reminded me of a book called “Gut Feelings” by Gerd Gigerenzer that has been influential in the development of the personalization engine for Likematter. Though the cover does little to suggest it, much of this book deals with the importance of constraining available information in making successful decisions.
It’s intuitive that reducing information, much like eliminating functionality, simplifies our tasks, making it easier and faster. But is the resulting decision better? Do we achieve better results with more data to work with, more capabilities in our tools? Gigerenzer’s research is about showing that not only does less mean easier, but less actually means better results. He cites evidence from his work and elsewhere to support his claim that simple rule-of-thumb heuristics can actually outperform data-hungry, expensive algorithms in making a wide range of decisions.
Making sense of massive amounts of data in real time with limited computing resources requires the same problem-solving process that he describes in this book:
- Get good at knowing what information is important
- Have simple rules, but make sure that they’re the right ones
What might seem like a shortcut can actually produce a user advantage on top of being cheaper and faster. This is encouraging!
I’m curious to know if anyone has looked at this effect with respect to user experience. What, beyond eliminating negatives through ease-of-use, speed, efficiency, and cost savings, has the constraining of Twitter’s message size or Google’s search page layout done to create the core value that’s made these huge successes?
