New Perspectives On Web Design

By Tim Kadlec CHAPTER 4

organ donors^21 (PDF). In the United States, where the default option is not
to be an organ donor, 28% of people consent to be organ donors. Compare
that with Belgium, where the default option is to consent to being an organ
donor. There, 98% of people are organ donors.
Bringing it closer to home, Jared Spool conducted an experiment^22 to
see how many people changed any of the 150+ (at the time) settings avail-
able to them in Microsoft Word.

What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed

had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the

exact configuration that the program installed in.

Perhaps even more interesting, was the reason they didn’t change
these settings. One setting turned off by default was Word’s autosaving
functionality. So in the default settings, the option to save a document as
a person was working on it was disabled. When people were asked why
they didn’t change the setting, they revealed that they assumed there was a
reason it was off.

Of course, this mean[t] that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned

off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing:

They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore

who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,”

several of the participants told us.

This thinking about defaults creeps its way into how we use our devel-
opment tools as well. Much of the weight of these tools is there as a result
of solving very specific issues that you may or may not run into. As Spool
and many before him have discovered, when they’re baked in by default

21 http://www.dangoldstein.com/papers/DefaultsScience.pdf
22 http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-their-settings/