Choice overload

To understand how to reduce the time consumption and exhaustion of selecting music for the design of the advanced music discovery tool, a literature study was done about choice overload.

When people are presented with an abundance of options, the phenomenon known as "choice overload" may occur, which can lead to increased difficulty in decision-making, decreased satisfaction with the final decision, and heightened potential for regret.¹ Despite the common belief that an increased number of choices is beneficial, research has demonstrated that choosing from a larger pool of options can often be more challenging. As people’s cognitive resources are limited, an increased number of options can rapidly deplete their mental energy and leave them feeling overwhelmed which can often lead to exhaustion.²

Therefore, presenting many filtering options and music results to choose from is what can make filmmakers exhausted while using royalty-free music platforms.

To reduce choice overload, the following actions can be considered^{2 3}:^‍

• Reduce offerings

• Categorise offerings

• Highlight offerings

• Help users compare offerings

• Treat choices as nonreversible (even if they technically are)

Regarding the music discovery tool, all of those were considered as useful. The music results could be reduced to a small number or categorised per mood or genre. Furthermore, they could be prioritised where only the most relevant ones to the filmmaker’s search request would be highlighted. The tool could also provide clarity about why a certain music result is a good choice which can help to compare the various music results. Finally, the tool could treat the choices of filmmakers as nonreversible (or hard to be reversed) by, for example, presenting a batch of music results where the filmmaker can pick only one and the rest are saved in history.

However, some of these considerations felt similar to what royalty-free music platforms have (e.g. sorting the music results by relevance or excluding specific moods from the search request). To come up with a more innovative approach, inspiration had to be sought from different fields. That is when a way to treat choices as nonreversible was found in the gamification concept about making choices in the game Reigns:

Reigns is a game where players are medieval monarchs who have to make nonreversible decisions about the development of their kingdom by swiping left or right to accept or reject offerings. Link to game.

This choice overload research provided clarity about ways to reduce the time consumption and exhaustion of selecting music. The findings were later proved useful to inform decisions about the design of the advanced music discovery tool such as reducing the amount of music results and treating them as irreversible choices to potentially ensure a more efficient selecting process. Inspiration about this was taken from the design of the game Reigns. This is further explained in the Concept Creation phase.