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Product thinking · 2 min

The off switch is part of the product

A librarian's guide to disabling intrusive AI is worth reading as product feedback. People are rejecting assistance they did not ask for.

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A librarian wrote a guide to turning off intrusive AI features. It made the front page this week, and it is the most useful product feedback I have read in a while, mostly because it was never addressed to product teams.

The guide describes, patiently and in order, how to make software stop interrupting you.

Its complaint is about intrusion, and that is more damning than rejecting AI outright.

Assistive, or intrusive

People draw the line between a tool that waits to be asked and one that inserts itself.

The same summarisation feature is welcome behind a button and resented when it rewrites the top of a page you were already reading. The model is identical in both cases. The difference is who started it.

That distinction is invisible in a feature spec and obvious to anyone using the thing.

It also has a precise cost in our world. If a hint arrives before a learner has formed an attempt, it replaces the retrieval the exercise existed to produce. They read a correct answer, feel the pleasant click of recognition, and remember nothing, because recognition exercises a different skill from retrieval.

Offer the same hint thirty seconds later, on request, after a real attempt, and it lands on a mind that has committed to something. The correction sticks. The sentence and the model are the same, and the outcome is the opposite. The timing decides whether the hint teaches anything.

The number that flatters you

This part is uncomfortable for whoever owns the roadmap, because they are the one measuring adoption.

It is easy to report high adoption of something on by default and awkward to turn off. That number measures your defaults.

Two ways to count adoption
Illustrative. A feature that is on by default and awkward to switch off produces high adoption numbers that say nothing about whether people want it.

The number that would tell you something is how many people would switch it on themselves. Almost nobody instruments for that, because the answer is usually worse and nobody asks for a metric that makes them look bad.

And if a meaningful share of your users go hunting for instructions to disable a feature, that is also a usage signal, and it is the kind that stays out of the deck.

So ship the capability, and let the person ask for it. Make the first invocation cheap and obvious, make the second one automatic if they want it, and never make the third one mandatory. Then measure the claim you are making, which is that somebody chose the feature and came back.

The guide is here. Before you read it, ask yourself which feature would be at the top if someone wrote one of these about your product.

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Product designConsentAI featuresUser feedback
Mosab Alrasheed
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