This is probably my favorite part of the article. It doesn't matter if you have blank screens/pages, this ultimately communicates something, whether intentional or not. This is the main underpinning of the entire article. UX and rhetoric are deeply connected, focusing on communication to an audience.

The use of free trials with automatic subscription renewal. A user signs up for a free 30-day trial of a streaming service, gets used to having unlimited access to content, and begins to feel a sense of ownership over the service. When the trial is about to end, the fear of losing access to their favorite shows and the convenience they've grown accustomed to is a more powerful motivator to pay for the subscription than the initial value proposition of the service was.

A person who owns a stock that is losing value. Even if it makes more financial sense to sell the stock and cut their losses, they may hold onto it for too long, hoping it will recover.

A long online form that asks for too much information at once. When a user is presented with 20 fields to fill out on a single page, they have to expend a lot of mental energy just to keep track of what they need to do, what they've already done, and what the next step is. This high cognitive load can be reduced by using progressive disclosure—breaking the form into smaller, more manageable steps, like a multi-step checkout process.

Trying to cook a new, complex recipe in a chaotic environment. The intrinsic load is the mental effort required to understand the recipe itself, such as reading unfamiliar terms or following new techniques. The extraneous load is the additional mental effort caused by distractions, like a TV blaring in the background, a pet running around, or kids asking for things.

On a subscription page, a company might display its most expensive plan first, like a "Premium" plan at $50/month. This high price becomes the anchor. When a user then sees the "Standard" plan for $20/month, the latter seems much more affordable and like a great deal in comparison, even if it's still more than the user might have initially wanted to spend.

Imagine shopping for a new TV. If the first TV you see is priced at $2,000, that price becomes your anchor. When you later find a similar TV for $1,200, it seems like an amazing deal in comparison, even though $1,200 might still be an objectively high price.

Important and frequently used links, such as "Home" and "Contact Us," are often placed at the beginning and end of the menu bar to increase the likelihood of users noticing and remembering them.

Designers often place the most important actions, like "Home" or "Contact Us," at the beginning and end of a navigation bar. By doing so, they capitalize on both the primacy effect (remembering the first item) and the recency effect (remembering the last item), making it more likely that users will recall and engage with these critical navigation points.

A "buy now" button on an e-commerce website is often designed to be large and prominently placed near the product description and price. By making the button large, it's an easier target for the user's cursor or finger to hit, and by placing it close to the relevant information, the travel distance is minimized.

A golfer trying to sink a putt. The time and difficulty of the putt increase with the distance to the hole and decrease with the size of the hole. It's much easier to make a short putt into a larger, novelty-sized hole than it is to make a long putt into a standard one.

If a website's top menu has only five clear categories, a user can quickly scan and select the one they need. Conversely, if the menu has 20 or more links, the user will spend more time analyzing each option, which can lead to frustration and cause them to abandon the site altogether.

Ordering at a restaurant with an extremely large menu. When you're presented with a massive list of appetizers, entrées, and desserts, it can take a long time to read through all the options and decide what you want.

Imagine a user, excited about a new app, is scrolling through a product page. They've already decided they want to buy the product, so they're looking for information that supports their decision, like positive reviews or high ratings.

A sports fan who believes their team wins whenever they wear a specific lucky jersey will focus on the games the team won while they wore the jersey. They will conveniently all the times the team lost while they wore it, or they might rationalize the losses by saying they "didn't wear it correctly."

This is important when maintaining things like a website / application's UI / over a long period of time. If you revamp the visuals, it can keep the experience fresh.

You could design the most intuitive and perfect interface possible, but if it looks terrible, people aren't going to feel as positively about it.

If you design an interface with an extreme amount of options/preferences, users can quickly become overwhelmed and end up not utilizing the tools to the fullest extent possible.

I appreciate the clear policy when it comes to attendance. Some professors aren't straight forward when it comes to leaving class early.

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