In 1999, Professor Baba Shiv (currently at Stanford) and his co-author Alex Fedorikhin did a simple experiment on 165 grad students.They asked half to memorize a seven-digit number and the other half to memorize a two-digit number. After completing the memorization task, participants were told the experiment was over, and then offered a snack choice of either chocolate cake or a fruit bowl. The participants who memorized the seven-digit number were nearly 50% more likely than the other group to choose cake over fruit. Researchers were astonished by a pile of experiments that led to one bizarre conclusion: Willpower and cognitive processing draw from the same pool of resources. Spend hours at work on a tricky design problem? You are more likely to stop at Burger King on the drive home. Hold back from saying what you really think during one of those long-ass, painful meetings? You’ll struggle with the code you write later that day.
Since both willpower/self-control and cognitive tasks drain the same tank, deplete it over here, pay the price over there.
Maybe we’ll think more about what our users really care about. Maybe we’ll ask ourselves at each design meeting, “is this a Fruit-choosing feature or a Cake-choosing feature?” and we’ll try to limit Cake-choosing features—the ones that really drain them — to that which supports the thing they’re using our app for in the first place.
But if it’s “content” designed solely to suck people in (“7 ways to be OMG awesome!!”) for the chance to “convert”, we’re hurting people. If we’re pumping out “content” because frequency, we’re hurting people.
Your app makes me fat (via @aresnick)
