Derek Thompson’s concept of “aha” moments, where disfluency transitions to fluency, is key to engaging audiences and enhancing their experience with our offerings, prompting us to explore how to integrate these moments into our storytelling, product education, and marketing.

In this video lesson, Derek Thompson explores the concept of MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable), illustrating how successful products balance familiarity and surprise, using examples like Star Wars and the iPhone, while highlighting the pitfalls of innovations like Google Glass that failed to resonate with consumers.

Rita McGrath advises business leaders to identify strategic inflection points and adopt eight best practices, including engaging with customers, incentivizing forward-thinking, confronting inconvenient truths, and observing emerging trends to enhance decision-making and reduce reliance on luck.

Professor Cass Sunstein highlights that “sludge,” or bureaucratic frictions like excessive paperwork and waiting times, hinders access to benefits, and suggests conducting a sludge audit to streamline workflows and improve quality of life by identifying and reducing these inefficiencies.

Ethical companies should consider the cognitive burden their products impose, as limited bandwidth can hinder marginalized populations from navigating administrative barriers, leading to distributional unfairness and potential human rights violations, necessitating thoughtful design to ensure equitable access.

Professor Cass Sunstein discusses how companies use “sludge” to complicate unsubscribing, manipulating consumer behavior against their interests, while advocating for “choice architecture” that promotes beneficial defaults and simplifies decision-making while preserving user freedom.

In a video lesson, professor Cass Sunstein discusses how inertia and various cognitive biases, such as present bias and status quo bias, affect consumer behavior, offering insights on how designers can structure products and services to better engage customers and highlight important features.

In a video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein discusses three types of designers—manipulative, naive, and human-centered—highlighting how the latter prioritizes user experience by minimizing “sludge” and fostering customer satisfaction.

In this video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein explores the concept of “sludge”—the bureaucratic obstacles that hinder access to essential services—using Kafka’s “The Trial” and a COVID-19 case study to illustrate how reducing these barriers can improve people’s lives.

In a video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein discusses how bureaucratic delays, termed “sludge,” hinder our access to desired services and offers strategies for organizations to minimize these frictions, ultimately reclaiming valuable time for individuals.