Last month I was booking a flight. On the seat selection screen, there's a small tag that says "Recommended," already ticked, ₹450 extra. I almost paid for it without noticing. You have to actively tap to remove something you never asked for in the first place.
That tag wasn't designed for me. It was designed by someone whose job is to make sure I don't notice it.
Most choices in a day aren't really choices. They're defaults someone else has already set, sitting there, waiting for you to either accept them or go to the trouble of changing them. The pre-ticked seat. The insurance add-on at checkout that's "included" unless you remove it. The first three results on any search, sitting exactly where your eyes land first, because someone paid to be there. The palm oil in a packet of biscuits that never needed it, present only because it's the cheapest thing that survives a year on a shelf.
Tumse poochne se pehle hi decide ho chuka hota hai ki tumhe kya chahiye.
This is the part of my job that doesn't clock out when I leave the desk. At MontyCloud, I'd open a screen someone had built two years before I joined, and the question that showed up first, before any technical one, was: why does it look like this, and who benefits from it staying this way. That question followed me out of the building. It shows up at the airport. On a search page. In the three seconds before I tap "Continue."
The honest answer to "who benefits" is almost never the person tapping the button. It's whoever built the screen. ₹450, multiplied across a few lakh bookings a year, stops being pocket change and starts being a forecast. Someone modelled that number before I ever saw the seat map, and the model works because most people don't look twice. Why would they. The seat gets booked, the flight takes off, and there's nothing anyone could point to afterward and call a loss.
I notice this more than most people I know find comfortable to be around. I check what an app wants access to before I open it the first time. I look twice at any "discount" to see whether it's actually one, or just the price they meant to charge all along. A friend told me once, half-joking, "yaar, kabhi toh yes bol diya kar."
Maybe he's right, most of the time. But "yes" was designed by someone too, for someone, and that someone usually isn't the one saying it.
I still don't know if I've ever picked the actual cheapest seat on a flight. That's not the real question.
Sawal yeh hai: aakhri baar kab tumne, kuch uthane se pehle, yeh check kiya ki woh faisla tumhara tha, ya pehle se kisi aur ka?
Credits & further reading
- Atomic Habits, James Clear. The "systems over goals" argument is the clearest explanation for why a pre-ticked box on a checkout screen works on so many people: environment beats intention almost every time, and someone designed that environment on purpose. Clear's habit architecture (cue → craving → response → reward) is the mechanism a "Recommended" tag is quietly leaning on.
- Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett & Dave Evans (Stanford). The literal application of design thinking to life decisions, including "gravity problems": constraints you've accepted as fixed that might not be. A useful frame for noticing how many of your defaults were never actually decisions.
- The Four-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss. Not a book I'd endorse wholesale, but the underlying move, asking which defaults in your life were built by someone else for someone else's benefit, is exactly the instinct this note is about. The question "who designed this, and for whose benefit" comes from that direction.