Making good use of lock-in features

In the digital world, there are a lot of ways that companies try to lock you in. They may give you a pop-up when you try to leave a site to entice you to stay. They may offer a discount if you try to unsubscribe from their mailing list. They might create an unnecessarily long contract to literally keep you locked into their service.

Lock-ins are generally a bad thing, but at times we can use them to our advantage. In his book “ The Design of Everyday Things “, author Don Norman shares a favorite lock-in feature:

A lock-in keeps an operation active, preventing someone from prematurely stopping it. Standard lock-ins exist on many computer applications, where any attempt to exit the application without saving work is prevented by a message prompt asking whether that is what is really wanted. These are so effective that I use them deliberately as my standard way of exiting. Rather than saving a file and then exiting the program, I simply exit, knowing that I will be given a simple way to save my work. What was once created as an error message has become an efficient shortcut.

I think many of us have used that lock-in to our advantage in the past. For me, it’s kind of weird not seeing it in many web applications now. If you go to close a Google Doc, you won’t be warned — it just closes. The reason, of course, is that it’s constantly…