Law of Minimal Effort

Because people default to minimal effort, showing the effort they'd save later might help motivate users through harder steps, e.g., importing settings.

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Users may put minimal effort into learning how a product works, so contextualising each option could help improve understanding and reduce mistakes.

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Daunting features may be skipped when not bothering is an option, so lowering the effort needed to try them could help increase feature usage.

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Tiimo I'm busy right now...

Habits let users run on autopilot with minimal effort, so helping them form one could lead to users maintaining routines more easily and possibly lower churn.

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FocusPomo Tilting your rewards

Written by Peter Ramsey

Consultant to 100+ companies

Published: 01/09/2023

How to utilise this in your designs

You could promote a new feature with clickable examples, so trying it takes minimal effort, rather than users working out what to type themselves.

Example from

Netflix

Try pre-filling a document name with its first line of text and auto-highlighting it, so the path of minimal effort is to keep it or delete it in one keystroke.

Example from

Google

You could remind users of the manual effort they'd face if they skip importing settings, so completing the step becomes the path of least effort.

Example from

Arc

You could experiment with letting new users create a habit before making an account, so the first step takes minimal effort and sign-up comes later.

Example from

Atoms

Try offering a simple mode with larger buttons, clearer labels and fewer options at once, lowering the effort users need to understand each screen.

Example from

Uber

Possible impacts

Users may settle on the first plausible option rather than scanning further, so showing fewer choices at once could help hold their attention for longer.

As seen in:

Because people default to minimal effort, showing the effort they'd save later might help motivate users through harder steps, e.g., importing settings.

As seen in:

Users may put minimal effort into learning how a product works, so contextualising each option could help improve understanding and reduce mistakes.

As seen in:

Daunting features may be skipped when not bothering is an option, so lowering the effort needed to try them could help increase feature usage.

As seen in: