Decision Fatigue and Design
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Aye Moah, CPO of Baydin (Boomerang) talks about how to design web and mobile products to limit the effects of decision fatigue. Research has shown that making decisions depletes blood sugar and therefore willpower. There are four important steps to take to minimize this effect: eliminate decisions, order decisions to maximize user experience, bundle decisions together into common categories, and, finally, take advantage of randomness. This talk provides real-word examples of each of these steps and shows you how they provide better results and design better products.
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Decision Fatigue and Design
- 1. Aye Moah | CPO @ayemoah Arts and Crafts Beer Parlor 26 W 8th St New York, NY 10011 Decision Fatigue and Design Helping users make better decisions
- 2. They are all impacted by decision fatigue. What do car dealerships, parole judges and web design have in common?
- 3. 2010 : Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University He’s a criminal justice researcher. And he wanted to see if the outcome of the cases is solely determined by the facts? What are the extraneous factors that are impacting the outcomes? How much time you’ve already served. The length of the sentence across types and severity of offense, previous criminal record and race and gender. Extraneous factors in judicial decisions PNAS Apr 2011 Full text available at : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.ful l Justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”. Reference Paper : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full
- 4. Findings: % of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break. As a parolee, your chances of getting your request approved is much higher at the very beginning of the work day or after a food break than later in a session. Image credit : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.fig ures-only Justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”. Study : 8 judges in Israel over 1000 judicial rulings over 10 months.
- 5. After a break, the probability of getting parole request goes back up. Image credit : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.fig ures-only Justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”. Study : 8 judges in Israel over 1000 judicial rulings over 10 months.
- 6. Again after a lunch break, similar pattern happens. Image credit : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.fig ures-only Justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”. Study : 8 judges in Israel over 1000 judicial rulings over 10 months.
- 7. The order the case is presented to the judge has a lot more to do with whether a prisoner gets his parole granted. NOT what the judge ate for breakfast. How long it’s been since breakfast (or a food break).
- 8. accept the default. the safe choice. the status quo. “Deny the request.” ultimate energy saver: do nothing. the explanation behind is why the judges are making harder decisions after a meal is linked to glucose level. It’s physical and why it’s related to food breaks. • Every decision depletes willpower • Willpower is finite • Lower willpower leads to suboptimal decisions More research on will power depletion, self control and blood glucose by Galliot and Are the judges “hangry”? Depletion
- 9. Setting a prisoner free vs. picking your toothpaste or shampoo A different study asking people to choose which color pen they would like depletes their glucose level even micro decisions matter. Magnitude of decisions doesn’t matter.. Even considering and having to make ‘faux’ decisions still makes you fatigued. Booking flights Buying a laptop or any device with options Setting up a new account Picking a restaurant
- 10. Getting coffee used to only involve “Do I want coffee? Do I have 5c?”
- 11. Now, you have to decide what type of coffee, what size, what special flavors you want to add. It’s a decision matrix.
- 12. Picking a restaurant now involves picking which review site you want to trust? How do you sort/filter? What about what dish to order? Why should you care if people are having decision fatigue? They will abandon what they are doing. Cart abandonment. Sign up abandonment. They will also make bad decisions and choices that make your service/product less useful
- 13. Intro to personal background. Born and raised in Burma. Studied CS at MIT. Worked as UX designer for 5 years. Started Baydin as a co- founder and we make email productivity tools. Everyone kind of sees their inboxes as unlimited supply of decisions to be made. The more I researched about productivity and daily habits for people, the more decision fatigue keeps coming up. Aye Moah -- Born and raised in Burma Studied CS at MIT Worked as UX Designer for 5 years Started Baydin Created Boomerang – Most used Gmail Plugin
- 14. Techniques to dealing with decision fatigue Eliminate decisions Choose order and timing Package many decisions into one Random choice Eliminate decisions Choose order and timing Package many decisions into one Random choice
- 15. Online dating has become easier on people by reducing decisions you have to make : Going from okcupid – choosing which profile to view, message, set up a date to Tinder where you choose just yes or no from a picture. Now it’s moved on to services like Whim http://www.trywhim.com/ -- even less decisions Any day you want to go on a date, Whim gives you 3-5 algorithmically selected date possibilities. “You'll review and say yes/no to each one. At 6 pm we'll ping you and one of the people you liked, suggesting a time and place to meet up that same evening.” source : http://www.dailydot.com/technology/whim- dating-app-same-day-instant-date/ Eliminate decisions
- 16. See startups doing subscription services that aim to eliminate decisions for you like Plated and many meals in a box delivery businesses. Eliminate decisions
- 17. Busy mom with no time to shop for your kids’ craft.. The rise of subscription boxes is a way for really busy people to cope with decision fatigue. Eliminate decisions
- 18. Are the boxes the best deal you can get? Probably not. They are probably not the optimal buying choices you can make. Yet they suffice your needs. They are good enough for you to get stuff done and get your needs met without you spending a ton of time. Eliminate decisions Satisficing : Satisfy + Suffice
- 19. Order and timing really matters for two reasons. 1. The later it gets in the series of decisions you have to make, the more likely the user will accept the given defaults or worse, they abandon. So you should order major decisions that matter early on. Things that shouldn’t matter for your users should be decided later and make sure you give them sensible defaults. 2. Will power depletion can be reversed if the user has a chance to replenish the reserve somehow. If possible, let things wait and don’t bombard your users to make all the decisions right away. Executive function can be restored and mental fatigue overcome, in part, by interventions such as viewing scenes of nature , short rest , experiencing positive mood, and increasing glucose levels in the body. Eliminate decisions Order and timing Package many decisions into one Random choice
- 20. Twitter optimizes for the number of people you follow as their primary onboarding metrics. To do that, they want to know what topics you’re interested in. They even provide a hard to mess up default “Popular accounts” already checked as the step 2 of their process. So if you don’t want to decide what topics you care about, you’re not stuck – you can just click Continue. Order and timing
- 21. Again, already pre-selected 40 accounts for you to follow. You don’t have to decide anything if you don’t want to but they would rather you spend your willpower on selecting which accounts you follow rather than what profile pic you use (which is the last step of the process). Order and timing
- 22. This can be taken advantage of by designers. By the time you get to second to last step, you are starting to get tired, Twitter puts “Invite your friends” as the primary default action since you will have less willpower to find a non-default link to skip that step. Then at the very end, they make it easy for you to start reading and interacting with the product without forcing to choose a profile pic or write a bio right away. They know you’re already exhausted from choosing topics and accounts to follow. Order and timing
- 23. This can be taken advantage of by designers. By the time you get to second to last step, you are starting to get tired, Twitter puts “Invite your friends” as the primary default action since you will have less willpower to find a non-default link to skip that step. Then at the very end, they make it easy for you to start reading and interacting with the product without forcing to choose a profile pic or write a bio right away. They know you’re already exhausted from choosing topics and accounts to follow. Order and timing
- 24. If you go to a car dealership, the more exhausted by decision fatigue, the more likely the buyer is going to agree to default choices provided by the dealer. This is where they get your money. Source NYT article Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? : http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazi ne/do-you-suffer-from-decision- fatigue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& “Sequential choices and the apparent mental depletion that they evoke also increase people's tendency to simplify decisions by accepting the status quo” “German car buyers, for instance, were more likely to accept the default attribute level offered by a manufacturer later in a sequence of attribute decisions than earlier, particularly when these choices followed decisions between many alternatives that had required more mental resources to evaluate.” Order and timing - Evil Edition
- 25. If you go to a car dealership, the more exhausted by decision fatigue, the more likely the buyer is going to agree to default choices provided by the dealer. This is where they get your money. Source NYT article Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? : http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazi ne/do-you-suffer-from-decision- fatigue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& “Sequential choices and the apparent mental depletion that they evoke also increase people's tendency to simplify decisions by accepting the status quo” “German car buyers, for instance, were more likely to accept the default attribute level offered by a manufacturer later in a sequence of attribute decisions than earlier, particularly when these choices followed decisions between many alternatives that had required more mental resources to evaluate.” Order and timing - Profit Booster Screen Shot 2015-05-31 at 3.49.24 PM.png
- 26. Eliminate Decisions Choose order and timing Package many decisions into one Random choice
- 27. Car dealers have done packaging for a while now as in which trim of the car you’d like to buy. And packaging many decisions into one selection of trim and price point. Package many decisions into one
- 28. Car dealers have done packaging for a while now as in which trim of the car you’d like to buy. And packaging many decisions into one selection of trim and price point. Package many decisions into one
- 29. Instead of having to pick each furniture piece and their style, you can package them up into limited choices of overall style. Image source : screenshot from http://www.havenly.com/ Package many decisions into one
- 30. Instead of having to pick each furniture piece and their style, you can package them up into limited choices of overall style. Image source : screenshot from http://www.havenly.com/ Package many decisions into one
- 31. Instead of having to pick each furniture piece and their style, you can package them up into limited choices of overall style. Image source : screenshot from http://www.havenly.com/ Package many decisions into one
- 32. When you don’t have anything to go on, giving a random choice as default saves the time and bother for your user. As you collect more information from the user and get more context, you can start providing more appropriate and better informed defaults later on. Eliminate Decisions Choose order and timing Package many decisions into one Random Choice
- 33. Image credit : Paul Thurlby for the Guardian “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do as well as one carefully selected by experts” – Burton Malkiel And they did beat the market when it was simulated in an experiment. http://www.cfainstitute.org/learning/products /publications/dig/Pages/dig.v44.n1.16.aspx Monkeys switching their brains to random mode is discussed in this paper http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092- 8674(14)01107-6 Random Choice - Poison Oracle
- 34. Image credit : Paul Thurlby for the Guardian “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do as well as one carefully selected by experts” – Burton Malkiel And they did beat the market when it was simulated in an experiment. http://www.cfainstitute.org/learning/products /publications/dig/Pages/dig.v44.n1.16.aspx Monkeys switching their brains to random mode is discussed in this paper http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092- 8674(14)01107-6 Random choice – Malkiel’s Monkey Malkiel’s Monkey Strategy
- 35. This is not a new technique. The ancient Greek tradition of filling some government positions by lottery. http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadM edia/agoraMuseum.html Random choice - Kleroterion Kleroterion
- 36. When you don’t have anything to go on, giving a random choice as default saves the time and bother for your user. As you collect more information from the user and get more context, you can start providing more appropriate and better informed defaults later on. Eliminate Decisions Choose order and timing Package many decisions into one Random Choice
- 37. Pinterest Sign Up process 2 years ago Image Credit – useronboarding.com
- 38. Pinterest sign up today - image : screenshot from Pinterest.com 1. Reduced decisions (removed search, only need to choose 6 categories) 2. The topics are broader (easier for user to decide whether he/she loves or hates it) 3. Less scary to make a decision if you can fine tunes things later 4. Use slight customization from knowing gender to present somewhat sensible defaults (even if a bit stereotypical)
- 39. Bring a piece of candy when you need to propose a risky project to your boss! Have questions or comments? Twitter: @ayemoah Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- Let’s talk about decisions! How did you choose to attend this conference? What flights did you book? How did you decide to come to this talk? And how did making all these decisions impact your ability to make new ones? My name is Moah, and today we’ll talk about the effect of cumulative decisions and how they impact your brain. I’ll show you some real world examples of how understanding decision fatigue can help us design better products for our users!
- They are all impacted by decision fatigue.
- 2010 : Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University He’s a criminal justice researcher. And he wanted to see if the outcome of the cases is solely determined by the facts? What are the extraneous factors that are impacting the outcomes? 1000 court rulings made by 8 judges over 50 days. These 8 judges handle about 40% of all parole requests in the country. How much time you’ve already served. The length of the sentence across types and severity of offense, previous criminal record and race and gender. Extraneous factors in judicial decisions PNAS Apr 2011 Full text available at : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full
- Findings: % of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break. As a parolee, your chances of getting your request approved is much higher at the very beginning of the work day or after a food break than later in a session. Image credit : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.figures-only
- After a break, the probability of getting parole request goes back up. Image credit : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.figures-only
- Again after a lunch break, similar pattern happens. Image credit : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.figures-only
- The order the case is presented to the judge has a lot more to do with whether a prisoner gets his parole granted.
- Or is it something more? As a judge, you are making decisions! Having to repeatedly make decisions makes the judges more susceptible to accept the default. the safe choice. the status quo. “Deny the request.” ultimate energy saver: do nothing. the explanation behind is why the judges are making harder decisions after a meal is linked to glucose level. It’s physical and why it’s related to food breaks. Every decision depletes willpower Willpower is finite Lower willpower leads to suboptimal decisions More research on will power depletion, self control and blood glucose by Galliot and Baumeister : http://psr.sagepub.com/content/11/4/303.full.pdf+html
- Setting a prisoner free vs. picking your toothpaste or shampoo A different study asking people to choose which color pen they would like depletes their glucose level even micro decisions matter. Magnitude of decisions doesn’t matter.. Even considering and having to make ‘faux’ decisions still makes you fatigued. Booking flights Buying a laptop or any device with options Setting up a new account Picking a restaurant
- Getting coffee used to only involve “Do I want coffee? Do I have 5c?”
- Now, you have to decide what type of coffee, what size, what special flavors you want to add. It’s a decision matrix.
- Picking a restaurant now involves picking which review site you want to trust? How do you sort/filter? What about what dish to order? Why should you care if people are having decision fatigue? They will abandon what they are doing. Cart abandonment. Sign up abandonment. They will also make bad decisions and choices that make your service/product less useful
- Intro to personal background. Born and raised in Burma. Studied CS at MIT. Worked as UX designer for 5 years. Started Baydin as a co-founder and we make email productivity tools. Everyone kind of sees their inboxes as unlimited supply of decisions to be made. The more I researched about productivity and daily habits for people, the more decision fatigue keeps coming up.
- Techniques to dealing with decision fatigue Eliminate decisions Choose order and timing Package many decisions into one Random choice
- Online dating has become easier on people by reducing decisions you have to make : Going from okcupid – choosing which profile to view, message, set up a date to Tinder where you choose just yes or no from a picture. Now it’s moved on to services like Whim http://www.trywhim.com/ -- even less decisions Any day you want to go on a date, Whim gives you 3-5 algorithmically selected date possibilities. “You'll review and say yes/no to each one. At 6 pm we'll ping you and one of the people you liked, suggesting a time and place to meet up that same evening.” source : http://www.dailydot.com/technology/whim-dating-app-same-day-instant-date/
- See startups doing subscription services that aim to eliminate decisions for you like Plated and many meals in a box delivery businesses.
- Busy mom with no time to shop for your kids’ craft.. The rise of subscription boxes is a way for really busy people to cope with decision fatigue.
- Are the boxes the best deal you can get? Probably not. They are probably not the optimal buying choices you can make. Yet they suffice your needs. They are good enough for you to get stuff done and get your needs met without you spending a ton of time.
- Order and timing really matters for two reasons. 1. The later it gets in the series of decisions you have to make, the more likely the user will accept the given defaults or worse, they abandon. So you should order major decisions that matter early on. Things that shouldn’t matter for your users should be decided later and make sure you give them sensible defaults. 2. Will power depletion can be reversed if the user has a chance to replenish the reserve somehow. If possible, let things wait and don’t bombard your users to make all the decisions right away. Executive function can be restored and mental fatigue overcome, in part, by interventions such as viewing scenes of nature , short rest , experiencing positive mood, and increasing glucose levels in the body.
- Twitter optimizes for the number of people you follow as their primary onboarding metrics. To do that, they want to know what topics you’re interested in. They even provide a hard to mess up default “Popular accounts” already checked as the step 2 of their process. So if you don’t want to decide what topics you care about, you’re not stuck – you can just click Continue.
- Again, already pre-selected 40 accounts for you to follow. You don’t have to decide anything if you don’t want to but they would rather you spend your willpower on selecting which accounts you follow rather than what profile pic you use (which is the last step of the process).
- This can be taken advantage of by designers. By the time you get to second to last step, you are starting to get tired, Twitter puts “Invite your friends” as the primary default action since you will have less willpower to find a non-default link to skip that step. Then at the very end, they make it easy for you to start reading and interacting with the product without forcing to choose a profile pic or write a bio right away. They know you’re already exhausted from choosing topics and accounts to follow.
- This can be taken advantage of by designers. By the time you get to second to last step, you are starting to get tired, Twitter puts “Invite your friends” as the primary default action since you will have less willpower to find a non-default link to skip that step. Then at the very end, they make it easy for you to start reading and interacting with the product without forcing to choose a profile pic or write a bio right away. They know you’re already exhausted from choosing topics and accounts to follow.
- If you go to a car dealership, the more exhausted by decision fatigue, the more likely the buyer is going to agree to default choices provided by the dealer. This is where they get your money. Source NYT article Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? : http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& “Sequential choices and the apparent mental depletion that they evoke also increase people's tendency to simplify decisions by accepting the status quo” “German car buyers, for instance, were more likely to accept the default attribute level offered by a manufacturer later in a sequence of attribute decisions than earlier, particularly when these choices followed decisions between many alternatives that had required more mental resources to evaluate.”
- If you go to a car dealership, the more exhausted by decision fatigue, the more likely the buyer is going to agree to default choices provided by the dealer. This is where they get your money. Source NYT article Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? : http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& “Sequential choices and the apparent mental depletion that they evoke also increase people's tendency to simplify decisions by accepting the status quo” “German car buyers, for instance, were more likely to accept the default attribute level offered by a manufacturer later in a sequence of attribute decisions than earlier, particularly when these choices followed decisions between many alternatives that had required more mental resources to evaluate.”
- Back in 2006, I was in my mid 20s. Planning a trip to Paris for the first time. I didn’t have much responsibility or decisions to make at work. So after work every night, I looked forward to planning my trip. I read endless reviews on which hotels, what restaurants and which museums. Kayak probably gave me 100 potential flight options that work, 50 to 100 hotels to comb through and read a dozen reviews for each of them before narrowing them down. Same with activities and sight seeing. I was able to customize my trip and pick one of the 100 k options.
- Now that I am in my 30s and I am a co-founder at a startup. Making decisions is a major part of my work hours. And when I get home, I am done. I don’t want to make any more decisions. Thinking about planning a vacation trip with 100 thousand options to choose from is overwhelming. Maybe it might just be I am selling out. Or I am suffering the affects of decision fatigue in my daily life. Last year’s vacation with my husband, I decided to go with an all inclusive deal.
- Instead of having to pick each furniture piece and their style, you can package them up into limited choices of overall style. Image source : screenshot from http://www.havenly.com/
- http://wealthfront.com
- Looks great! Open my account >> an easy button to click. I don’t have to understand what an index fund is or how much do I want in stocks vs bonds? They are now packaged together.
- When you don’t have anything to go on, giving a random choice as default saves the time and bother for your user. As you collect more information from the user and get more context, you can start providing more appropriate and better informed defaults later on.
- Image credit : Paul Thurlby for the Guardian In central African cultures, they have a system called The Poison Oracle. Survive – Yes, Die – No Clearly that’s rather cruel to the chicken that are force fed poison for no good reason. “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do as well as one carefully selected by experts” – Burton Malkiel And they did beat the market when it was simulated in an experiment. http://www.cfainstitute.org/learning/products/publications/dig/Pages/dig.v44.n1.16.aspx Monkeys switching their brains to random mode is discussed in this paper http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(14)01107-6
- Image credit : Paul Thurlby for the Guardian In central African cultures, they have a system called The Poison Oracle. Survive – Yes, Die – No Clearly that’s rather cruel to the chicken that are force fed poison for no good reason. “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do as well as one carefully selected by experts” – Burton Malkiel And they did beat the market when it was simulated in an experiment. http://www.cfainstitute.org/learning/products/publications/dig/Pages/dig.v44.n1.16.aspx Monkeys switching their brains to random mode is discussed in this paper http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(14)01107-6
- This is not a new technique. The ancient Greek tradition of filling some government positions by lottery. http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html
- Pinterest Sign Up process 2 years ago Image Credit – useronboarding.com
- Pinterest sign up today - image : screenshot from Pinterest.com Reduced decisions (removed search, only need to choose 6 categories) The topics are broader (easier for user to decide whether he/she loves or hates it) Less scary to make a decision if you can fine tunes things later Use slight customization from knowing gender to present somewhat sensible defaults (even if a bit stereotypical)
- Bring a piece of candy when you need to propose a risky project to your boss!