The Fascinating Power of Defaults
The design of your product’s initial state is surprisingly impactful
I’m obsessed with default states. To me, the out-of-the-box-but-post-onboarding state of a device or software application is one of the most important design decisions you can make because it’s the only state most users will experience. Default states on large platforms also cause something akin to the technological equivalent of a gravitational pull. They cause massive change by slowly playing on each user’s desire to find the path of least resistance.
Anytime you seek to have a user change away from that default state; you are introducing a huge amount of friction and have to convince the user that such a change is worth their time and effort. You probably also have to teach them how to make that change and sometimes even convince them to re-open their wallets — Yikes.
Given all that, lets look at two examples of the incredible impact of default states:
Apple helped kill the optical CD/DVD drive
Let’s look at hardware first. The minute Apple removed the optical CD/DVD drive from the MacBook Air in 2008, physical media’s days were numbered. Nobody wants to deal with the hassle of buying and lugging around another peripheral just to read CDs or DVDs. At first, a good amount of people may take the hit and get the peripheral, but their frustration slowly affected the way they thought about software purchases. CD-less software applications suddenly felt easier and more convenient to use. Eventually (with the help of better internet infrastructure, smartphones, and the plunging cost of flash storage), being CD-less became table stakes in the software industry. Directly downloading a program from a website became the path of least resistance.
The same type of thing can happen with software too.
Slack makes organizations more transparent
If you work at a startup, you have probably been using Slack for a while now. If you are not currently using it, you will be soon . Slack does something pretty remarkable; it changes a company’s default way of communicating to be more transparent. Email makes it easy to message individuals or mailing lists but hard to make a message visible to a large number of people — defaulting a company’s communication practice to one that is inherently hidden and opaque.
Slack makes it almost effortless to post to open chat groups it calls ‘channels’ (which in turn are joinable by all employees by default), but asks you to take a few extra steps if you want to message a specific person or make a more exclusive channel — defaulting the organization’s communication practice to one that is more open and transparent. The net effect is that more employees feel in the loop, and a lot less tedious forwarding and ‘looping-in’ happens.
The results speak for themselves.
On the hardware front, the combination of more companies following Apple’s lead , additional investment in internet infrastructure, and plunging data storage costs has all but killed physical media.
On the software side, Slacks continued war on email is going extremely well. Just look at some of their results:
Slack would never have been seen as more transparent than email if it defaulted to private communication. And, while eventually digital media may have overtaken physical media without Apple dropping the drives from their product line, their bold design choice shook everyone out of their comfort zone and forced them to start thinking about a world where we didn’t use discs.
