I was reading this blog from a 21-year-old designer named Dustin Curtis. I read it to the end.
You need to set aside a good 20 minutes to enjoy this experience - he covers a lot of ground, from behavioral science to the compatibility of creativity and large companies.
Apparently, working for a bureaucracy is no excuse, just don't take no for an answer. Easily said. Only the brave, the chosen, or the incredibly naive or stupid that way go.
I was captivated by the discovery of a designer who can write!
He's put together a compelling series of 13 pages of seemingly unrelated articles except, like Socrates, he was constructing an argument, a logic.
If you swallow his premises, you'd sign up to follow him on Twitter.
It is an experiment.
It followed a simpler language experiment he'd conducted testing the effectiveness of asking, as opposed to telling people, to follow: be forceful, just tell them to follow by clicking here.
You'll get almost 13 per cent better results if you say "You should follow me (click) here", Curtis says.
He makes this revelation in 13th chapter.
Somehow I read the last chapter first so I knew the end of the story - though I didn't realise it.
So when I read "You should follow me here" (at the bottom of his webpages), I was willful. I didn't. He was making me jump a lot of hoops here.
I wanted to know if it was worth it.
I was waiting for the pay-off - not realising that I'd already read it.
I'm the kind of person who waits until the end of the film before I make up my mind on whether it's good or whether I like it - one exception: Portrait of a Lady.
A good ending makes everything OK in my books.
But this rule doesn't apply to novels which are infuriating if you reach the end only to discover it's a dud!
Sometimes, I'll listen to a door-to-door salesman just to hear what he has to say and then I'll say no.
But sometimes I'll even say yes - this is extraordinary to anyone who thinks that actually know me.
When I was about Curtis's age, I too learned about Pavlov's dogs, in Psychology 101 - along with the fact that conformists use footpaths.
From that moment every time I was confronted by a footpath, I consciously chose my path ... sometimes the footpath (if I feel conformist) or not.
I like choice. Except when I'm standing in front of the porridge section of the supermarket looking at a trillion flavours and I just want the plain, dependable porridge.
So as a consumer I want to be surprised, I want to be entertained, I expect to benefit from the experience and I want it to work - that goes for websites or supermarkets.
So why didn't I follow Curtis on Twitter?
Don't know. I didn't chose that footpath I guess.
You should read Dustin Curtis's blog, here : http://dustincurtis.com/index.html