Stewart Butterfield: preference

Transcript context

…Absolutely. Yeah. And honestly, it's been many more than 10 years since I read it, so I don't even remember all of the examples in the book, but as a mantra that was up there with utility curves because for two reasons. One is it's just like it's expensive to make a decision. You literally burn glucose. There's a metabolic action. There's ATP created in the mitochondria and your neurons and a bunch of stuff is happening and people do get decision fatigue and there is cognitive cost of all these things. But also there's an emotional aspect, which is, if your software stops me a second and asks me to make a decision and I don't really understand it, you make me feel stupid. I'm like, "I don't understand this." Some people, maybe their orientation is, "Okay, the software is stupid." But I think most people are like, "Oh, I'm dumb." And if you ever talk to people who aren't especially technologically savvy, the canonical example is people who are under 50 talking to their parents about using some piece of software and what they're supposed to do, the parents always feel stupid like they're the ones that are wrong. And so if you're causing people to think, in the best case, it's unnecessary use of their biological resources, and in the worst case you've now made them feel bad, emotionally bad, and they're going to associate that with the product forever. And these are things that are just kind of rolling one into the other. So I'm going to keep going with one last thing, because they just kind of come together, which is along with reduced friction, it's like reduce the number of clicks or taps it takes for someone to accomplish something which is almost always exactly the wrong thing. It's the easiest way you could make any action in your app, a single click or tap by just exposing every single possibility on one screen that scrolls for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages. And obviously that's terrible. So why do people think that a little bit of that is good? And here's an example. You open a menu, there's 14 things that people might want to do. Level one is group them into like items and put a vertical, sorry, horizontal divider between them so at least people can kind of chunk and see what there is. Step two is present the two or three most common things or the five most common things, whatever and then have some form of other and then you go to a sub menu that has more items and the decision of how to tune that becomes incredibly important. I'm going to pick on Google again just because it is, I feel like I'm Donald Trump here, but I'm going to interrupt myself again with a story. It's- Yeah, let's do it.…

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