Decision Fatigue and Design

Aye Moah | CPO

@ayemoah

Arts and Crafts Beer Parlor26 W 8th StNew York, NY 10011

Decision Fatigue and Design

Helping users make better decisions

They are all impacted by decision fatigue.

What do car

dealerships, parole

judges and web

design have in

common?

2010 : Jonathan Levav of Stanford and ShaiDanziger of Ben-Gurion UniversityHe’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.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% 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

Justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”.

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

After a break, the probability of getting parole request goes back up.Image credit : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.figures-only

Justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”.

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

Again after a lunch break, similar pattern happens.

Image credit : http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889.figures-only

Justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast”.

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

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).

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 :

Are the judges “hangry”?

Depletion

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 leveleven micro decisions matter.Magnitude of decisions doesn’t matter.. Even considering and having to make ‘faux’ decisions still makes you fatigued. Booking flightsBuying a laptop or any device with optionsSetting up a new accountPicking 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.

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 fatigue Eliminate decisionsChoose order and timingPackage many decisions into oneRandom choice

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 decisionsAny 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

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

Eliminate decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

Order and timing - Evil Edition

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.”

Order and timing - Profit Booster

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

Eliminate Decisions

Choose order and timing

Package many decisions into one

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 selection of trim and price point.

Package many decisions into one

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

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

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

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

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

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 MalkielAnd 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

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 MalkielAnd 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’sMonkey

Malkiel’s Monkey Strategy

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

Random choice - Kleroterion

Kleroterion

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

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 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!

Have questions or comments?

Twitter: @ayemoah

Thank you!