Researchers marked a line with yellow duct tape across the width of shopping carts, and placed a sign on the cart asking shoppers to place fruit and vegetables in front of the tape line, and the rest of their groceries behind the line. “And what we saw was a bump of a 102% increase in purchasing of fruits and vegetables with that simple sign and line,” Payne said. Payne’s idea was to use some social psychology to provide some help for consumers facing a bombardment of food hype in the media and in the store.Grocery experiment provokes healthier purchases
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Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he’d be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can’t remember and a future he can’t contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. “He’s happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it’s because he doesn’t have any stress in his life,” says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby.Joshua Foer, Remember This from National Geographic Magazine
_____ will miss you.
A few weeks ago I decided to delete my Facebook account, so I was directed to this insanely well designed “deactivate” page. It shows pictures of you and your friends with the copy “_____ will miss you.” I was surprised to see my voluntarily provided information and content used not exactly against me, but in a way intending to sway my decision away from deactivating my account. It worked. In fact, I didn’t end up cancelling my account—I clicked on one of the images and browsed for another twenty-minutes or so. I had forgotten how many pictures and connections I was about to delete.
Today I found out that Julie Zhuo, a product manager at Facebook, recently gave a talk called Design Lessons From 350 Million, outlining how a team of 35 designers at Facebook designs a site for 400 million users.
Here’s one of the points from Julie’s presentation:
Be data informed.
Example: looked at deactivation page and adjusted it convince people to stay by adding pictures of friends. Had a big impact, kept 1 million people a year on the site.
One million people. That is a huge number of users saved by one clever page.
The whole five point summary posted by Luke Wroblewski is an interesting read, but I find the deactivate page to be particularly brilliant and diabolical.
Even so, your account is only “deactivated,” laying dormant until you choose to login again. For those braver than myself, the real Facebook delete button is here.
The more capable and multipurpose our tools become, the more the burden of deciding what they do shifts on us. Physical constraints must be replaced by artificial ones, and the effectiveness of our tools becomes an extension of our own willpower and self-discipline. Without these constraints, our devices essentially become amorphous blobs that aren’t really great at getting anything done.
Jack Cheng on Habit Fields at A List Apart
A great article about design, memory, and getting shit done.
See also: Notes on Objectified.
Designers from IDEO: since the invention of the microchip, objects no longer need to look like what their function is. A glass and plastic rectangle can contain the internet.
Karim Rashid on archetypal design: “I have an iPod in one pocket, a cellphone in the other, and I’m on my laptop, yet I go to sit down and the chair looks like a wagon wheel with its wooden spindles!”
QVC is expert at creating what consumer psychologists call “parasocial relationships”—bonds that tickle our subconscious in many of the ways that real friendships do. And as anyone who has ever been to a Pampered Chef home selling event can testify, when a friend is pushing the goods, it’s very hard not to buy something.
Projecting that sort of intimacy when you’re alone on a set isn’t easy.
Megan McArdle, The Genius of QVC
(via Raul)
If I had to compare my spending on books to one of the states of matter (solid, liquid, or gas) it would probably be gas, because my book-buying consistently expands to fill my bank balance. What I mean to say is that I just bought We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion by Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris and it’s amazing. You can look at spreads from the book online and also play around with the wonderful application on which the book is based.
The way [Pandora] hooked me in with the free hours made me feel like this is something I should probably pay for because I clearly value the service they are providing. Thinking about it more, this perhaps might be an interesting model for publishers. Not sure how it would work or if tracking time spent on a website is the way to go or not, but it would be interesting if content producers could come up with easily digestible measurements to show consumers how much they value the service or content that’s being provided. This would weed out the fickle viewers and for the power users it would make them realize how much they actually value the content they are consuming. The goal is always to hook your dedicated power users.
There are clearly some challenges to something like this, but from a psychological point of view Pandora has put me in a position where I understand how much I value their service and the great benefits I will receive if I subscribe. Regardless if I end up paying a subscription fee or not, they have made a compelling offer, and no matter what, that’s what content producers and service providers need to do. Make compelling offers and show consumers how much they value the content or service that’s being provided.
Bryan Formhals — la pura vida: You Are Running Out of Free Hours
The $6 purchase price of the McSweeney’s iPhone app comes with delivery of free iPhone formatted web content everyday forever and six months of exclusive, bespoke (designed) content once a week. It’s totally worth it. If they keep up the good job, I have no qualms about renewing for another $6 (from within the app, charged to iTunes!) when my subscription lapses…I’ve been hooked.
I jotted down some thoughts on the night of the iPad announcement about why it’s awesome but my opinions have basically been reiterated across the web. This is an incredible opportunity (big screen, touch based, app store, always online) to design interactions!
I was skimming through Apple’s iPad Human Interface Guidelines last night (Google it if you want to find a leaked PDF) and one part that struck me as particularly interesting was to let users play with your application before asking them to provide any more information than the system provides. If it’s still necessary later, do it as soon as you can, but not until the user has gotten a test drive and run into a situation that requires filling out a form—or in this case, buying a paid subscription.
Bouba/Kiki Effect
“This picture is used as a test to demonstrate that people may not attach sounds to shapes arbitrarily.”
5 emotions you never knew you had
(fiero, amae, nache, schadenfreude, ennui)
Language is the strangest thing.
(via jennilee)
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
- Bertrand Russell. Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia
Nothing new, but it’s been making the internet rounds again recently. Finally reblogged out of convenience from the Tumblr dashboard! (Is that really what it’s come to?)
(via giantrobotlasers)