Hack Mental Health SF 2019
Winner, 01 April 2019
We built Amazoff: A toolbar that curbs Compulsive Buying Disorder through inconvenient design
5.8%. That is the lifetime prevalence of Compulsive Buying Disorder in the US general population. Put into perspective, 1 in 17 people suffer from this disease. Compulsive Buying Disorder (CBD) is characterized by distress or impairment that can only be alleviated through excessive spending. Overspending has turned into a very pressing issue today.
We aim to use inconvenient design to steer behavior away from overspending and curbing CBD. Much research has been put into studying human psychology, but ultimately all of these rest upon the psychology of the “Nudge Theory” created by 2017 Economics Nobel laureate Richard Thaler. We aim to cause users of our application to reconsider buying things online by introducing friction into the checkout process.
Introducing Amazoff — Curbing Compulsive Buying Disorder through Inconvenient Design. Our solution is a simple Chrome extension that inconveniences the users before they make their purchases. We do so by modifying the Amazon webpage in various ways so that users need to actively process the events happening on the page. This forces users to do type 2 thinking, and actually consider whether they really need the item.
I would be continuing to create the product as part of my entrepreneurship activities and would wish to release this product into the market.
For more information, I wrote a write up on the hackathon that can be found here