Getting Unstuck at Work
How We Can Make Life Easier for Citizens, Customers, and Employees
In a video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein discusses how bureaucratic delays, termed “sludge,” hinder our access to desired services and offers strategies for organizations to minimize these frictions, ultimately reclaiming valuable time for individuals.
An Introduction to Sludge
In this video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein explores the concept of "sludge"—the bureaucratic obstacles that hinder access to essential services—using Kafka's "The Trial" and a COVID-19 case study to illustrate how reducing these barriers can improve people's lives.
What Kind of Designer Are You?
In a video lesson, Professor Cass Sunstein discusses three types of designers—manipulative, naive, and human-centered—highlighting how the latter prioritizes user experience by minimizing "sludge" and fostering customer satisfaction.
How Designers Can Work with—or Against—Consumer Biases
In a video lesson, professor Cass Sunstein discusses how inertia and various cognitive biases, such as present bias and status quo bias, affect consumer behavior, offering insights on how designers can structure products and services to better engage customers and highlight important features.
Understand the Power of Choice Architecture—and Its Shadow Side
Professor Cass Sunstein discusses how companies use "sludge" to complicate unsubscribing, manipulating consumer behavior against their interests, while advocating for "choice architecture" that promotes beneficial defaults and simplifies decision-making while preserving user freedom.
Key Considerations for Designing Inclusive Services
Ethical companies should consider the cognitive burden their products impose, as limited bandwidth can hinder marginalized populations from navigating administrative barriers, leading to distributional unfairness and potential human rights violations, necessitating thoughtful design to ensure equitable access.
How to Conduct a Sludge Audit
Professor Cass Sunstein highlights that "sludge," or bureaucratic frictions like excessive paperwork and waiting times, hinders access to benefits, and suggests conducting a sludge audit to streamline workflows and improve quality of life by identifying and reducing these inefficiencies.
Unnecessarily long waiting times, excessive paperwork, confusing interfaces — these are all examples of what professor Cass Sunstein calls “sludge”: the everyday bureaucracy and “frictions that separate people from what they want to get.” A certain amount of this muck is unavoidable. But organizations can enhance their employees’ and customers’ experiences by reducing sludge wherever possible.
Learning Objectives
- Practice human-centered design.
- Account for consumers’ behavioral and cognitive biases.
- Nudge users toward beneficial behaviors while preserving their freedom of choice.
- Minimize cognitive load and distributional unfairness.
- Assess the quantity and costs of the sludge pervading your systems and operations.