The power of defaults

This is my Volvo. I recently took it to the regular maintenance to only get it back with door mirrors not closing upon locking the car. That day was freezing cold in Vienna, and the car stayed for hours under the snow. I immediately realized something wasn’t working, but I blamed it to the outside temperature. So I decided to wait for a warmer day.

When the day came, and I pushed the open button, but nothing happened to the mirrors. I guessed that this was not a mechanical failure, rather a software reset that took the mirror control back to its default setting. As car makers do not design interfaces that let users learn from their mistakes, I expected to find an answer to my problem in the car manual. Which indeed happened on page 108.

Restoring the door mirrors to my preferred settings was an easy job. But reading the manual, I also learned so much about other wonderful things my door mirrors can do, that I started feeling daunted about the many potentially cool features my car can have that I am not aware of.

Shift this learning to banking, and ask yourself: “How might users find out about the cool features we keep adding to our digital touchpoints?”

Would you still default them off? Would you expect them to read a manual?