decision fatigue and design (aye moah)

Aye Moah | CPO@ayemoah

Arts and Cra*s Beer Parlor 26 W 8th St New York, NY 10011

Decision Fatigue and Design

Helping users make better decisions

They are all impacted by decision faEgue.

What do car dealerships, parole

judges and web design have in common?

2010 : Jonathan Levav of Stanford and Shai Danziger of Ben-‐Gurion University He’s a criminal jusEce 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 impacEng the outcomes? How much Eme 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 : hZp://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.full

Justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”.

Reference Paper : 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% a*er a break. As a parolee, your chances of geang your request approved is much higher at the very beginning of the work day or a*er a food break than later in a session. Image credit : hZp://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.figures-‐only


Study : 8 judges in Israel over 1000 judicial rulings over 10 months.

A*er a break, the probability of geang parole request goes back up. Image credit : hZp://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.figures-‐only



Again a*er a lunch break, similar paZern happens. Image credit : hZp://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.

NOT what the judge ate for breakfast.

How long it’s been since breakfast (or a food break).

Or is it something more? As a judge, you are making decisions! Having to repeatedly make decisions makes the judges more suscepEble to accept the default. the safe choice. the status quo. “Deny the request.” ulEmate energy saver: do nothing. the explanaEon behind is why the judges are making harder decisions a*er 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 depleEon, self control and blood glucose by Galliot and Baumeister : hZp://psr.sagepub.com/content/11/4/303.full.pdf+html

Are the judges “hangry”?

Depletion

Seang 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 maZer. Magnitude of decisions doesn’t maZer.. Even considering and having to make ‘faux’ decisions sEll makes you faEgued. Booking flights Buying a laptop or any device with opEons Seang up a new account Picking a restaurant

Geang 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 faEgue? 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 producEvity tools. Everyone kind of sees their inboxes as unlimited supply of decisions to be made. The more I researched about producEvity and daily habits for people, the more decision faEgue 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

Techniques to dealing with decision faEgue Eliminate decisions Choose order and Eming Package many decisions into one Random choice

Eliminate decisions

Choose order and timing

Package many decisions into one

Random choice

Online daEng 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 hZp://www.trywhim.com/ -‐-‐ even less decisions Any day you want to go on a date, Whim gives you 3-‐5 algorithmically selected date possibiliEes. “You'll review and say yes/no to each one. At 6 pm we'll ping you and one of the people you liked, suggesEng a Eme and place to meet up that same evening.” source : hZp://www.dailydot.com/technology/whim-‐daEng-‐app-‐same-‐day-‐instant-‐date/

Eliminate decisions

See startups doing subscripEon services that aim to eliminate decisions for you like Plated and many meals in a box delivery businesses.

Eliminate decisions

Busy mom with no Eme to shop for your kids’ cra*.. The rise of subscripEon boxes is a way for really busy people to cope with decision faEgue.

Eliminate decisions

Are the boxes the best deal you can get? Probably not. They are probably not the opEmal 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 Eme.

Eliminate decisions

Satisficing : Satisfy + Suffice

Order and Eming really maZers 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 maZer early on. Things that shouldn’t maZer for your users should be decided later and make sure you give them sensible defaults. 2. Will power depleEon 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. ExecuEve funcEon can be restored and mental faEgue overcome, in part, by intervenEons such as viewing scenes of nature , short rest , experiencing posiEve mood, and increasing glucose levels in the body.

Eliminate decisions

Order and timing


Random choice

TwiZer opEmizes 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 ConEnue.

Order and timing

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 selecEng which accounts you follow rather than what profile pic you use (which is the last step of the process).

Order and timing

This can be taken advantage of by designers. By the Eme you get to second to last step, you are starEng to get Ered, TwiZer puts “Invite your friends” as the primary default acEon 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 interacEng 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

If you go to a car dealership, the more exhausted by decision faEgue, 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 arEcle Do You Suffer From Decision FaEgue? : hZp://www.nyEmes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-‐you-‐suffer-‐from-‐decision-‐faEgue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

“SequenEal choices and the apparent mental depleEon that they evoke also increase people's tendency to simplify decisions by accepEng the status quo” “German car buyers, for instance, were more likely to accept the default aZribute level offered by a manufacturer later in a sequence of aZribute decisions than earlier, parEcularly when these choices followed decisions between many alternaEves that had required more mental resources to evaluate.”

Order and timing - Evil Edition

If you go to a car dealership, the more exhausted by decision faEgue, 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 arEcle Do You Suffer From Decision FaEgue? : hZp://www.nyEmes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-‐you-‐suffer-‐from-‐decision-‐faEgue.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

“SequenEal choices and the apparent mental depleEon that they evoke also increase people's tendency to simplify decisions by accepEng the status quo” “German car buyers, for instance, were more likely to accept the default aZribute level offered by a manufacturer later in a sequence of aZribute decisions than earlier, parEcularly when these choices followed decisions between many alternaEves that had required more mental resources to evaluate.”

Order and timing - Profit Booster

Screen Shot 2015-‐05-‐31 at 3.49.24 PM.png

Eliminate Decisions



Random choice

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 selecEon of trim and price point.


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 hZp://www.havenly.com/


When you don’t have anything to go on, giving a random choice as default saves the Eme and bother for your user. As you collect more informaEon from the user and get more context, you can start providing more appropriate and beZer informed defaults later on.

Eliminate Decisions



Random Choice

Image credit : Paul Thurlby for the Guardian “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a poryolio 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. hZp://www.cfainsEtute.org/learning/products/publicaEons/dig/Pages/dig.v44.n1.16.aspx Monkeys switching their brains to random mode is discussed in this paper hZp://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-‐8674(14)01107-‐6

Random Choice - Poison Oracle

Image credit : Paul Thurlby for the Guardian “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a poryolio 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. hZp://www.cfainsEtute.org/learning/products/publicaEons/dig/Pages/dig.v44.n1.16.aspx Monkeys switching their brains to random mode is discussed in this paper hZp://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-‐8674(14)01107-‐6

Random choice – Malkiel’s Monkey

Malkiel’s Monkey Strategy

This is not a new technique. The ancient Greek tradiEon of filling some government posiEons by loZery. hZp://www.alamut.com/subj/arEface/deadMedia/agoraMuseum.html

Random choice - Kleroterion

Kleroterion

When you don’t have anything to go on, giving a random choice as default saves the Eme and bother for your user. As you collect more informaEon from the user and get more context, you can start providing more appropriate and beZer informed defaults later on.

Eliminate Decisions



Random Choice

Pinterest Sign Up process 2 years ago Image Credit – useronboarding.com

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 customizaEon 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!

Have questions or comments?

Twitter: @ayemoah

Thank you!

decision fatigue and design (aye moah)

Technology