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July 18, 2024

The hidden power of defaults

Lessons in responsibility from web design, experimentation, and life

Early in my career, I learned a crucial lesson about defaults through a spectacular failed experiment.

I changed the text highlight color on Booking.com.

Inspired by the still-relatively-new HTML5 Boilerplate and watching hours of user research—specifically how people read on the website—I thought, “Why not?”

My reasoning seemed sound:

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