Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

ALCHEMY LESSON SIX: DARE TO BE TRIVIAL The combination of 28 words and a button in the below picture has been called ‘the $300m button’, and is frequently cited in articles about web design and user experience. It first appeared on an unnamed retail website, which many experts believe to be Best Buy. ‘The $300m button’. In fact, monumental effects of this kind are surprisingly common in web design. Perhaps one of the first rules of interface design is ‘don‘t try to be logical’. Jared Spool, the creator of the button, describes the form that customers from the website previously encountered when they came to complete a purchase: ‘The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register. The link was ‘Forgot Password’. It was the login form for the site. It’s a standard form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it? [But] we were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.” Some first-time shoppers couldn’t remember if it was their first time, becoming frustrated as each common email and password combination failed. We were surprised how much they resisted registering. Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalised how the retailer...