Effect Change: Become a Choice Architect
July 4th, 2010 • Design, Experience Design, Human Behaviour
Reading Nudge, and in the first few pages, came across the term choice architect. It’s a fascinating concept, of being able to influence decisions and change habits, simply by “organizing the context in which people make decisions.” It’s really all about (as the author goes on to say) understanding that “everything matters” and, in fact, it is those tiny, seemingly banal, details that matter most. Here’s an excerpt:
A recent example of this principle in action is Method Landry Detergent — it won this year’s International Design Excellence Award. The innovation here was not the detergent itself, but the bottle, or more acurately, the way you get the detergent out of the bottle.
Problem: people pour way too much laundry detergent into the wash. Solution: make the detergent highly concentrated and put it in a pump bottle. Changing the way people dispense the detergent (squeezing a few tiny drops versus pouring a cap full) very effectively changes their habit of overuse.
