Page:Aaron Swartz s A Programmable Web An Unfinished Work.pdf/37

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Robots and browsers and protocols are fun, sure, but if you want your site to succeed it ultimate has to appeal to humans—the real people who build and use all that other stuff. And even if information doesn’t, humans generally want to be free. If you don’t believe me, ask a friend to lock you in their trunk, and then reevaluate your position.

Greedy folks (i.e. businesspeople) tend to be kind of short-sighted about this. “If I put big metal spikes in front of the exit,” they think, “my customers will never want to leave! My customer retention rates will go thru the roof.” They decide to give a try and they have some big metal spikes installed in front of the exit. And, being the sober-minded realist businesspeople like to pretend they are, they measure customer retention rates before and after the metal spikes. And, sure enough, it worked—people aren’t leaving. Just look at those numbers! But what they didn’t measure is that people also aren’t coming back. After all, nobody wants to go someplace with spikes on the exits. Think about this next time you ﬁnd that pop-up ads increase sell-thru rates.

This is why a site like Amazon is such a cluttered mess of sell boxes. Amazon’s managers insist that they’re rigorously hard-headed engineers. The boxes are there because they sell things and their job is to make money. Clean, clear, uncluttered pages may appeal to kids in art school or Apple interns, but here in the real world cash is king. And like Mark Penn advising Hillary Clinton, if you don’t believe them they’ll pull out the numbers to “prove” it. Every box, they say, was carefully tested: half the users were given a page with the new box, half without. And the users who got the page with the box bought more.

Well, no duh. Obviously more people are going to buy something if you ask them to, just like more McDonald’s customers will SuperSize their order when the disaffected teenager asks them to. But Amazon’s gone way beyond that—now we’re into the realm of the girl-with-the-headset pitching us on every third item off the