Hijack 9:
Inconvenient Choices
It is said that corporations only need to “make choices available.”
- “You can always use a different product if you don’t like it.”
- “You can always unsubscribe if you don’t like it.”
- “You can always remove our app from your phone if you become addicted to it.”
Naturally, businesses try to make the decisions you want to make simpler and the decisions you don’t want to make harder. The same is done by magicians. You encourage a viewer to choose the option you favor while making it more difficult for them to choose the other.
You can “make a free decision” to end your digital subscription, for instance, at NYTimes.com. However, they send you an email with instructions on how to cancel your account by dialing a phone number that is only available during specific hours, rather than just completing it when you click “Cancel Subscription.”
We should consider the friction needed to implement choices rather than the availability of choices in the world.
Imagine a world in which decisions were classified according to their level of difficulty (similar to coefficients of friction), and that there was a separate organization, such as a trade association or non-profit, that classified these levels of difficulty and established guidelines for how simple navigation should be.
