🧠 Don’t Make Me Think

Hello! Adam Thornhill here. ‘The Podcast Guy’ saving you 10 hours a month.

Today, you’ll learn about setting smart defaults thanks to Lenny’s Podcast.

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You can’t build great products by letting users do whatever they want.

Sometimes, your job is to protect them from themselves.

Whether it’s misusing features or or getting lost in settings, the problem usually isn’t friction, it’s comprehension.

And if people don’t understand your product, they won’t stick around.

Slack’s ‘Don’t be a cock’ principle

We had this feature @everyone, which caused a notification to be sent to every member of the channel when a message was sent.

Someone would find this feature inside of an organization.

They would @everyone, everyone would get a notification, then the next person to send the message was like:

“My thing is more important than Bob, I’m going to also @everyone.”

It became really obnoxious. People would complain about it.

So we came up with the shouty rooster.

Internally, we said ‘don’t be a cock’. But we didn’t obviously say that publicly.

When you @everyone, a little rooster would pop up and have these sound waves coming out of its mouth. It would say:

“Hey, this is going to cause a notification for 147 people in eight different time zones. Are you sure you want to send this message with @everyone?”

This worked amazingly and the behavior dropped off.

We shaped the communication culture inside organizations.

Stewart Butterfield, Co-founder of Slack

Comprehension beats friction

70–80% of product design is comprehension.

People rarely open preferences. And even when they do, they don’t know what half the options mean.

If they don’t understand it, they won’t use it.

So when you’re designing something unique, something your product does differently, the challenge isn’t reducing the number of clicks. It’s clarity.

Stewart Butterfield, Co-founder of Slack

Why it matters

The customer isn’t always right.

If you give users too much freedom, they’ll abandon or misuse your best features.

That’s why great products do 3 things:

1. Set smart defaults. Most users never change them.

2. Shape behaviour. Use nudges, warnings, constraints, and delight.

3. Prioritise comprehension over friction. It’s not about making every path shorter - it’s about making it obvious.

No one uses what they don’t understand!

Next steps

Adopt a “don’t make me think” mindset in your product and growth teams:

• Default first. Design for what most people should do, not what they might do.

• Use nudges to teach. Think modals, tooltips, inline feedback, just-in-time education.

• Reduce cognitive load. Make it easier to decide, not just faster to click.

• Kill confusion early. If it takes a help article to explain, it probably needs a redesign.

Your thoughts?

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