16 Jan 2007 1356H

Libertarian paternalism and interface design

Just learned about this from Barry Schwartz’s talk at Google on the Paradox of Choice.

Libertarian paternalism, a term coined by University of Chicago profs Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, is a framework that says, in essence, that people often don’t act in rational ways that would be good for themselves or the greater good — commonly cited examples include opting into 401K plans and organ donations — and so, the state or corporation could act in ways that “nudge” actors to accept decisions that are deemed in the interest of the actors’ welfare, but allow them the liberty to easily opt-out, if they so chose. There’s a good podcast here, from the Chicago’s Great Ideas series, although it’s a bit hard to understand on account of poor production quality.

Anyway, for the interface, the default state is the checked box, wordsmith some copy that explains the benefit, and allow the user opt-out instead of opting-in. . . .

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1 response to "Libertarian paternalism and interface design"

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16 Jan 2007 1926H

tim writes:

when we were working on protestwiki, we intentionally reskinned mediawiki to reduce the number of choices that users had. when i had showed mediawiki to non-tech ppl they flipped out and were overwhelmed by the options. users could also toggle into “advanced mode” that had all the regular mediawiki features/options.

i tried to interest jimbo wales and those guys in it, but they never bit. i think they are pretty much in the unix-hacker model where the harder it is, the better, because it filters out users. that’s pretty fucking dumb. at some point, after the bar exam, i need to go back and upload the entire skin we designed, plus documentation, to the mediawiki site.

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