Every morning I perform a beverage ritual where I get a cup of coffee, dump a spoonful of sugar into it, and move on.
I know I should drink less coffee, I know I should add less sugar to it; but it's hard for me to make a change here.
Recently, Liz (my fiancé) made a small change that had a big impact on how much sugar I take.
She put a smaller spoon in the sugar bowl.
When I get a cup of coffee, a lot of what I'm doing is habit. After she switched the spoons I still get my coffee and add 1 spoon of sugar. Although I noticed the swap, the benefit I saw in having more sugar didn't outweigh the effort of having to get a bigger spoon. I've cut the sugar I'm adding into my coffee by half thanks to a change in spoons.
What Liz did is called choice architecture.
This illustrates the potential we have to impact people through small changes in the way we present options to them. We see this at
AWeber all the time. When we add something new to a prominent place on the dashboard, more people interact with it just by focusing more attention on the feature. This is an example of the same principle that leads super markets to
place sugary cereals at kids eye level.
When we're thinking about how to shape people's behavior to set them up for success, consider how hard it is to get to the features they need to interact with. It can have a major impact on behavior.
Resources on Choice Architecture:
✨🎇🎆
Other Storylines.
- Group X - A brilliant and funny write up of the design process and philosophy for a an anonymous group of artists and curators that are focused on breathing new life into the public art space in Philly
- Redefining what a map can be with new information and AI - The best maps app gets even bester. Wild to see how these maps are getting steadily better at reflecting the realtime, changing world.
