It's just like the story that Benjamin Franklin once told in terms of his life advice. 1
So he found that by normal logic, if you do a favor for somebody they should feel indebted to you and 2
they should be more willing to help you in the future. 3
But in fact in reality, it's almost the opposite. 4
So he told a story where he was trying to befriend somebody who was of a higher rank than he was. 5
And he went about it in a very interesting way. 6
He asked this man, a stranger, for his most prized possession, a book in his library. 7
Benjamin Franklin asked him if he could borrow that book for a week. 8
And you know it's kind of hard to say "No you cannot borrow my book." That's a bit mean. 9
So the man agreed and then so Benjamin Franklin took that book and locked it away for a week and then 10
gave it back as it was. He didn't need the book. 11
He just needed the other guy to do him a favor. 12
So he found that if he needed a favor from somebody, it's actually easier to ask them for a small favor 13
first because people feel- because people need to feel consistent because people need to feel consistent. 14
Your brain needs an explanation of why you gave this strange your most prized book and that must 15
be because you like him. 16
And so that means in the future bigger favors were actually easier to come by 17
from this man 18
and you can make yourself more likeable by asking for favors. 19
So why am I telling you about all of this in a user experience design class? 20
Well, the reason why a lot of people really enjoy user experience design is because it's closely tied 21
to human psychology. 22
A lot of times you're trying to persuade users to take certain actions such as stay in the app for longer 23
or make a purchase or play your game more often. 24
And there are what's known as light patterns and dark patterns. Now like patterns are things which are 25
kind of white hat. You know there are user experience design patterns that you can use- 26
you can use to nudge users towards a certain direction and they are usually beneficial both for the 27
user and for yourself. 28
And then there's dark patterns which is where you use design to trick people into performing certain 29
actions that are only beneficial to you and are bad for them. 30
So coming back to this SitOrSquat app. 31
If you needed the user to agree to the terms and conditions or if needed their GPS location, you have 32
to do it incrementally. Step one is getting the user to agree to something quite innocuous like the terms 33
and conditions. 34
And as you build trust and as the user gets used to using the app and then you can explain why you need 35
some slightly more sensitive data like turning on the GPS so that you can actually locate them and 36
find them the nearest bathroom. 37
Because otherwise if you do it all in one go right at the beginning where the user has no relationship 38
with your app and you're asking them for their location for notification access then most people tend 39
to say no 40
and it cripples the app making the user experience poor and therefore users will never get to enjoy 41
it.