Online commerce has made it easier than ever to shop, right? Maybe too easy. A recent study by comparison-shopping site Finder revealed that more than 88 percent of Americans admitted to spontaneous impulse buying online, blowing an average of $81.75 each time we lose control. Clothes, videogames, concert tickets. One in five of us succumb weekly. Millennials do it the most. "The main emotion that people feel after this impulsive spending is regret," says Jennifer McDermott, a consumer advocate for Finder. While it's not an impartial estimate, Finder calculates that we spend more than $17 billion on impulse buys-which is a lot of regret. 1 So McDermott's team decided to help us rein in our impulses. They created Icebox, a Chrome plug-in that replaces the Buy button on 20 well-known ecommerce sites with a blue button labeled "Put it on ice." Hit it and your item goes into a queue, and a week or so later Icebox asks if you still want to buy it. 11n essence, it forces you to stop and ponder, "Do I really need this widget?" Odds are you don't. 1 This is a lovely example of what I've come to think of as "friction engineering"-software that's designed not to speed us up but to slow us down. It's a principle that inverts everything we know about why software exists.
展开▼
