Nudging

Recently, a friend was working on a big research project.

Yesterday, he had Delicious links, PDFs, spreadsheets and Word documents open on his desktop when he came across a couple of useful presentations on Scribd.
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I’ll have them, he thought.
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So he clicked.
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What happened next surprised him:
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He was given the choice of logging in via Scribd or Facebook.
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Nudging is a risky business.
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Each nudge extracts an invisible price in terms of customer loyalty.
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The risks only increase with size.
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Empathy becomes important.
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Facebook?
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Why should he sign into Mark Zuckerberg’s site to download a presentation written by someone else and made available from somewhere else?
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Although the invitation was optional, it still felt like a kind of category error.
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This was Facebook pushing it's nose too far into someone else’s business.
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Specifically, his business.
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He felt jostled, hustled and nudged. (It actually is much worse, as Wired.com’s Priya Ganapati discovered.)
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Nudging is the name given by the authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein to describe the art of influencing user behavior by presenting options in specific ways.
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When they nudge us, businesses and government erect what Thaler and Sunstein call an architecture of choice around us.
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Last month, TechCrunch spotted a good example.
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This was Facebook’s decision to allow users to respond to a would-be friend by pressing a button entitled “Not Now”.
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Previously, Facebook forced users to choose between Confirm and Ignore.
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The change, Techcrunch suggested, was all about creating a de facto “follow” feature that doesn’t depend on the followed party giving permission.
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This, TechCrunch suggested, was an attempt by Facebook to “slyly beef up its social graph a bit more”.
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So what?
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Surely, nudging (not to mention “choice architecture”) has been around forever.
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What’s wrong with using a series of barely noticeable prompts and temptations to maximize revenues in the short term?
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Nothing.
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On the ad-funded web, it’s essential that users behave in a way that’s lucrative.
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Sometimes, they need encouragement.
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If you’re providing an expensive service for free, it’s surely not outrageous to treat users as sheep, funneling them toward the point at which they yield their maximum value.
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Or is it?
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Perhaps the really important thing about nudging is the frequency with which it’s done, and the way in which the nudging is presented.
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Some companies do it less than others.
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Although I suspect it adopts a tougher stance with business customers, Google has remained a reluctant nudger in consumer markets.
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If you’re a fan, you probably believe that this is because the company goes with the grain, striving to do no evil.
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If you’re a skeptic, you’ll argue that Google’s approach to its users is made possible by a cash-generative advertising business.
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Either way, the interpretation is largely positive.
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Aggressive nudging causes problems.
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As corporate self-interest becomes more important than user satisfaction, the nudging company’s approach to consumers becomes fragmented and incoherent.
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Thank goodness for this as it allows users to see the game being played

And the nudging to be seen for what it really is

So my friend made me aware of nudging in a way that I had not paid much attention to

Like most people I do not like being manipulated, because that is what it is for me

Manipulation pure and simple

So be aware that those simple choices presented to you all have intent