A List Apart: Meta-Moments - Thoughtfulness by Design.
Funny; Inbox by Google encouraged my signup. Once allowed in, I looked at the page, and realized it was unsuitable for my general use, so I went back to plain Gmail. I didn’t even notice the ‘friction’ - it was another new service that I thought I should be familiar with, in order to give my clients better recommendations.
ALA will, hopefully, forgive my using this article as a lever for a larger beef.
There are a subset of triggers that generate predictable behaviors - psychological stimuli, perhaps - that we all share. Just about every sales and marketing professional uses them.
Example: Give a person an unsolicited gift, they’ll feel obligated to the gift-giver. The gift-giver can then ask for outrageous payback and it will very often elicit amazing results. Note that the gift-giver has all the control over that transaction. This works consistently even with total strangers.
Another: Realty companies keep a couple of overpriced horrors on their listing services. When you come in to purchase a house, they run you through the horrors in your price-range first, setting up a psychological state of desperation, and then take you to the inventory they actually want to move. Generally a couple will seek to purchase the first non-horror they encounter, priced strategically just above what they should be able to afford.
There are thousands upon thousands of books on these techniques. Carrot and stick. Pig in a poke (cat in a bag). More. You can put new names to them if you want; the same old psych manipulation. Seeing websites resort to these timeworn tactics just means the internet has matured to parity with ‘reality’. Pull the Mad Men era salesmen out of retirement - they’re relevant again, online.
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