This week's best things
A checkout audit, films on Tiktok, Millennial and Gen Z shopping habits, research showing how difficult simplicity is, a gallery of footers, and 40 years of This Mortal Coil
A checkout designed for impulse purchases
Peter Ramsey regularly does very detailed, very good, often very insightful audits/breakdowns of a variety of web experiences.
His latest is a dissection of Hello Fresh’s checkout experience.
“They're incentivising people to abandon their carts, by cancelling, and trying to re-trigger the modal.
Instead, checkouts should automatically apply welcome deals—especially if it's one that the user has already seen, but arbitarily not accepted.”
It is always interesting to me when people take this sort of forensic approach to things to try and unpick how they work (and could work better).
Why everyone is watching shows and films on Tiktok now
In ‘new media consumption habits that I don’t really understand but that seem to be becoming a thing” news…
“the latest trend is to use the app as a streaming service.
“I thrive off watching a movie on TikTok in 43 parts,” one tweet reads. “I think I watched the whole season of The Bear from all these little clips on TikTok today,”says another”
Millennials and Gen Z Aren’t Shopping the Same Way
Some research focused on grocery shopping habits, and how they split across generational groups. As ever the findings are likely to have broader implications than just grocery shopping.
“while millennials continue to increasingly fill their online grocery carts, Gen Z has been ditching the apps in favor of in-person shopping. It turns out that just because someone’s younger doesn’t mean they’re always living 100% in the cloud.”
When Asked to Fix Something, We Don’t Even Think of Removing Parts
An interesting article in Ars Technica (from 2021) about a study of how people choose to improve things.
Turns out, people’s default approach is almost always additive.
“As a society, we seem to have mixed feelings about whether it’s better to add or subtract things, advising both that “less is more” and “bigger is better.” But these contradictory views play out across multibillion-dollar industries, with people salivating over the latest features of their hardware and software before bemoaning that the added complexities make the product difficult to use.”
“When asked to improve a travel itinerary, only 28 percent of the participants did so by eliminating destinations. Essay improvements led to an increase in word counts in all but 17 percent of the cases. People just didn’t tend to take things away in a huge range of contexts.”
Footer, the only footer gallery on earth
“It dawned on us that nobody cared about footers. Which is silly because if your hero is actually a hero, it’ll get people to scroll. And what’s at the end of that scroll? Exactly.”
This Mortal Coil
I saw a tweet from 4AD saying it’s been 40 years since This Mortal Coil released their cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren. So here’s a video of a very beautiful performance of a very beautiful song.
If you’ve seen something interesting, stick it in the comments! The algorithms are invading our lives, but the best stuff is still discovered and shared through word of mouth.