Title: Your app makes me fat
Context: How long before the Surgeon General places a warning on your app about how harmful it can be to your users’ health?
Synopsis: You know what’s hard? Choosing salad over cake. At least for me anyway. Know what’s even harder? Choosing salad over cake after a really, really taxing day of making decisions. And that’s not just for me, that’s for everyone, and that’s science. It seems that our cognitive decision making reservoir is finite, and is also the pool from which our will power is drawn. Spending more time and effort making decisions now, means you have less energy to spend on exerting self-discipline later. So, quite literally, the harder we make our software, products, and services to use for people, we are in turn, draining their psyche of the control they will eventually need to make smart life choices. So stop killing your users and design your products right. Simplicity isn’t just a good idea, it’s also good medicine.
Best Bit: “Maybe we’ll ask ourselves at each design meeting, ‘is this a Fruit-choosing feature or a Cake-choosing feature?’”
via seriouspony.com
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