Would you like tea or coffee?

Which kind of tea? Would you like milk in your coffee? Sugar?

I really don't like these questions, and for a while I didn't understand why. Isn't it nice to give options? What if I was a coffee hater and I was given coffee? Of course they should ask, right? Yeah, but it's more complex than that.

The process of deciding itself is also work. It's not a new idea, and it's been discussed over and over. Well, I want to discuss it too. Old discussions I'm talking about are decision fatigue - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue and emotion work - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_work (the way I learned about emotion work was different, and more related to what I'm talking about than the Wikipedia article, which focuses more on emotions than work).

The main idea, which no one probably argues with - decisions take work. It's the core of the decision fatigue idea, and I think it just makes sense - to decide you must think and analyze what the decision is about, even if it's something trivial. The ideas which are not as common are the consequences of that premise.

If I reverse this statement, it's "sometimes it's okay to take away people's freedom to decide". That sounds a bit political, and I don't mean it that way. I'm talking about personal life here, and about software.

For example, again, tea and coffee. Giving me free choice isn't good, because I like it less than if someone just gave me a cup of tea or a cup of coffee. But that's a tiny example. I think it's one of those ideas which become much clearer with examples, so I'll focus on those.

One I've heard of recently. Around the same time two websites appeared. Both were text-to-speech services - you write text, and you get an audio file of that text spoken aloud by a character. On the first site you could choose one of hundreds of characters. The second site only had one voice - every text was spoken by Donald Trump. Which of the two sites went viral?

It's everywhere, especially in UI. UI people figured this out long ago, and this problem is especially critical there. You want to give the power user the freedom to do whatever they want, every option they could think of. But you don't want to overwhelm the new user. So you end up with design patterns like "simple UI / advanced UI" switches, or introductions that show the main features and let them figure out the rest, minimalized views that gradually get more complex as you enable more plugins and features, and so on.

I've heard on a podcast recently that a person using ChatGPT didn't like that there was a model option. Would you like GPT4o, o1, o1-mini, GPT4o-mini, or turbo, or something else. They have no idea. They just want to ask things and get answers. That's one of the reasons I like using DeepSeek - they even removed the coder model, it's all just a single model, and the options are web search and deep chain-of-thought thinking, which both are a bit more understandable that model choice.

I think I first noticed this when I read an article on what it called "emotion work". Though I'm not sure I would even call it that. It was about some kind of initiative in life. Not waiting to be assigned a task, but doing it yourself.

The example that stuck it my mind was of a couple of friends you visited a young mother. She was very busy with chores, cooking and keeping watch over her baby. So the friends waited for her to finish cooking so they could hang out together, as they originall planned. At some point, distracted by the baby and overwhelmed, she either dropped something, or burned the food, or something like that. The friends suddenly jumped to help her, saying "oh, if you were so overwhelmed, you could have just asked, we were doing nothing anyway".

The point was that the young mom didn't have the mental capacity to ask for help. And even if you say "is there anything I can help with", it's much much easier to answer "no, it's fine" than to take on the role of the manager and start integrating the new person into your chores workload. If you instead say "is it okay if I watch the baby while you're cooking" or "let me finish cooking while you're watching the baby", you would take on that managerial role, and the mom wouldn't need to think about it herself.

The article also mentioned a couple similar examples and concluded that all that was the unseen emotion work that should be more aware of. I'm not sure about the "emotions" part, but I really liked the part about decisions.

If I'm going out with friends, and we need to pick a place, by saying "oh, anything is fine", I'm not being polite, I'm delegating choosing work to my friends.

So now I try to incorporate both. Just like how in UI you have a simple initial version with good default and a complex advanced version for power users, I try to give a default but leave the option to change it. "Oh, anything is fine, maybe X?" is much better than just "Anything is fine".

If you're ever in a situation when we meet irl and you want to pour me a hot drink, please phrase it like "Is black tea okay? There are other options". And then I'll just take whatever you suggested, and I'll politely nod at the mention of milk and sugar but don't take any because I'm too awkward.