What Your Customer Wants and Can't Tell You by Melina Palmer

Author:Melina Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2021-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Pain of Paying

Eighteen years before Kim Kardashian “broke the internet,” AOL beat her to the punch by launching their new pricing model in 1996.127 Before that, you bought set blocks of internet time:

•Twenty hours a month for $19.95

•Five hours a month for $9.95

Most people chose the twenty-hour model and were using between ten and fifteen hours a month. I’m sure someone at AOL said something like, “You know, ‘unlimited’ sounds so great. We could put that in our ads and reduce our tracking needs. It could be a win-win!” They probably assumed most people would still stay under twenty hours so it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

After all, someone using ten hours still had plenty of room before hitting their twenty-hour limit, so they must only have ten to fifteen hours’ worth of stuff to do, right?

Totally logical. And totally wrong.

Usage quadrupled basically overnight, and AOL couldn’t keep up. There were service issues and all sorts of problems—the company was even sued by a few users who struggled to use the system.

What happened? Why did everyone go bonkers once their internet access became unlimited?

Apparently, there was a little meter running in the corner whenever you logged on. You may remember it if you were using AOL about twenty-five years ago, but it was constantly tick-tick-ticking and counting the amount of time you were spending online. This kept the time you were spending in front of your conscious brain (time pressure), constantly reminding you there was a point soon where you might go over your limit.

No time limit = no clock.

And we all know how easy it is to get sucked into internet rabbit holes and not realize how long you have been jumping from site to site. Without a giant clock to remind you of the pain you will feel if you go over your limit, you are free to surf as much as you want. AOL learned that lesson the hard way.

This is also why Uber is so much easier to use than traditional taxis, where you are watching the meter tick up while sitting in traffic. Think about how your buying/user experience would differ if:

•Gyms charged for minutes in the facility or number of steps taken.

•Restaurants charged you per bite instead of for the meal.

•Netflix had a clock running and charged you for each fifteen-minute increment or show watched.

Constantly reminding your customers of payments and price is generally a bad business model. There is a very real pain of paying experience—studies show the insula (a pain center in the brain) lights up when making a payment.128 For us humans, this emotional pain is like physical pain. Luckily, just as Uber and AOL have discovered, there are ways to help people feel less pain when paying for things.

Interestingly, when the payment being made is time and not money (for instance, a long wait time), the reverse is true. Telling people about the process and what is going on behind the scenes can make wait times more tolerable.

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