Media Refl*x
Getting medieval about media, online that is.

Behavioral marketing (the power of default)

May 13, 2006 on 3:36 am | No Comments

Great read from O’Reilly Radar

“We tend to think people are driven by purposeful choices,” [Sendhil Mullainathan] explains. “We think big things drive big behaviors: if people don’t go to school, we think they don’t like school. Instead, most behaviors are driven by the moment. They aren’t purposeful, thought-out choices. That’s an illusion we have about others….”

It was this idea of the importance of defaults that led me to frame the idea of “the architecture of participation.” In discussions with Web 2.0 startups, I tend to hammer on this point: what are you doing to make participation automatic, and sharing as widely as possible the default behavior? (This is one reason Flickr became so successful. While Web 1.0 photo sharing services made sharing with your friends and family as the default, Flickr made “world” the default setting.)

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Filed under: Data, Behavior and Scale, User Experience