Decision, the power of default value
Working on application design or creation of e-forms, we often make check boxes or drop down selector. In most cases you probably don’t pay much attention setting up the default value of each choice you created. Should a particular checkbox is checked by default or unchecked. How many items to be displayed per page by default, or which country or age group should be selected by default for instance.
According to behavioural economist Dan Ariely, any value which is set by default will greatly influence decision that majority users is going to make when filling out the form or using a piece of functionality.
For example in Claromentis we have news application with option to set a particular news item as ‘sticky news’. The idea the sticky news will always be displayed on the Intranet homepage until it’s expired. It is a useful feature allowing an important news item remain visible to the majority Intranet users, otherwise it might get buried down quickly by not-so-important news.
What we didn’t realise the default value for the expired date is set a year in advance by default. For example if you submit a news on the 22nd May 2009, it won’t be off the sticky until the same date next year !
The problem is simple majority users are not even bothered to change the expired date.
The result, intranet’s homepage is filled with sticky news which should have been expired long time ago. In order to fix this problem, an Intranet administrator has to go through each news article and correct the expiry date, which was set incorrectly by majority users.
This problem won’t happen in the first place if the developer put sensible value when he or she typing the code for the news submission form. Interestingly enough in a much larger scale any default value which may sounds simple can have a huge impact.
Check out an interesting video below (open in new window).
I read an article today where a lady was battling an insurance company who took renewal payment on her credit card without her authorisation. She complained, and was told that when she paid her insurance over the phone the previous year, she has chosen the option “renew automatically”.
I bet she didn’t. And that this is a simple case of “click here if you do not want to renew automatically”.
I think as a company who will be asked for a lot of advise in designing e-forms, we will carry an obligation to deliver the e-forms to our client, but also with a moral obligation to the wider target audience who will be the end users of these forms.
However, note that sometimes a large organization implicitly discourages putting anything but a default value in there: it’s just too much responsibility to do so (not to mention that you have to think about what the default value should be). I suspect employees rarely get criticized when they use 1/1/1979 but when they put “today minus 1 week” (which is useful for 99% of cases) some user eventually comes in and complains: oh I didn’t see it because of the cutoff, and it caused me to miss an important report… then the mgmt springs into action, calls a meeting and says: make it 1 month, you fool why did you make it 1 week?! (disregarding that now 99% of people have to contend with an inconvenient view.). This way one loud outcry can cause hours of quiet inconvenience and annoyance to disappear and become disregarded.
In Ariely’s presentation from around 9:30, he seems surprised that a presence of a “bad” choice skews the people’s preferences. But I wonder whether this is a result not of “animal-like irrationality” (as he implies) but in fact the behavior seriously influenced by economic thinking and economic theory. Namely, the concept of arbitrage (Buy the “paper subscription and web access”, sell “just paper subscription” and keep web access for free) and the associated concept of “risk neutrality” (so the third choice is not an empty choice but in fact serves as a calibration point for the homo economicus and thus impacts his behaviour).
Have a good time in Singapore!
K.
@KK
Thanks for the feedback. I do agree that minimizing risk is fundamental to the approach of many people given choices and that this actually leads to some fairly odd results when analyzing herd behavior.
I a not sure most folks would think in terms of arbitrage – probably just, as you say, minimizing risk. Unless you rephrase “arbitrage” as “getting something for nothing” – which come to think of it is exactly what it is – so maybe they do think like that!
Nigel
P.S. In some situations, it would be nice to have some kind of “cloud” weighing system behind the default value that can auto-adjust depending on how users view the information. Or maybe have a different paradigm for user interface altogether, so that the user no longer has to face this “hard choice”. But those are clearly larger issues.
P.P.S. Wow, this blog now recognizes me!
@Nigel Davies
(Lastly…) I suppose I should’ve hit “reply” to you rather than type a new “submit comment”. K.