New in Gmail Labs: Stop sending email you later regret. This isn’t a joke, and it’s genius. Enable “Mail Goggles,” and Gmail will ask you a few math problems before it sends your email to make sure you’re sober enough to really mean what you just wrote. The feature is only active late at night in your timezone, and only on weekends, when some people might be prone to doing things they regret.
Love this idea, of designing things to be harder to encourage a certain behavior. We did something similar in our new Mission Office application here internally, making certain financial actions harder by requiring extra clicks or making the controls slightly obscure to discourage using them. Speed bumps are another example of using “poor” design to lead your user to act a certain way.