The Power of Defaults: How One Small Change Impacts 10,000,000 People (Plus Twitter’s New Home Page!)
Defaults are incredibly interesting. Behind every default choice on a major website, there’s an angry room of people yelling at each other. “Why can’t we move up the image two pixels?!” a Product Manager may say while pounding her fist on the table. “We should move the image down two pixels!!!” a Strategy Manager may counter. Then chimes in the VP of the Digital team, “why do we even need an image?”
For sites like Facebook and Twitter, defaults aren’t just interesting, they’re the lifeblood of the entire company. The things a user first sees when they navigate to a website channel the user’s behavior and their interaction with the site. In some instances, 95% of users don’t change or configure anything; they leave the page or application exactly how they found it.
Therefore, when Twitter launched their new homepage (their second homepage change in the past year), I was interested to examine the pages at a microscopic level: what changed, and what implications does this have for users navigating to twitter.com? Furthermore, an understanding of defaults may have dramatic effects on how you interact with pages online! Twitter isn’t the only company that does this: some of the most popular website you use–like Facebook, Google, ESPN, and Wikipedia–test defaults all the time.