[jmspool]

It wasn't simple on the back-end. Your estimate of "man-weeks" is off by an order of magnitude, because of the back-end system complexity.

As the article states, it started with the button, which, as you quite rightly point out, dominoed into a lot of changes and thinking about edge cases that didn't exist before. The point I was trying to make was that it started with the button.

The big story here isn't that adding this particular button will yield $300m in revenue. The story was that, by watching users, we saw an opportunity to reap $300m. And we took it and it worked.

[dansingerman]

Don't you think it is somewhat reductive not to even allude to that complexity in your article then?

Without that, the article does seem to claim that just changing the label of the button had that effect.

[jmspool]

The original draft had more detail. As did the backstory piece we wrote. Editors cut it down for page count. (It was originally a foreword to a book on web form design, which was all about the buttons and the fields.)

[CyberDildonics]

just be glad a clickbait title had a worthwhile article