How one simple button rewired human behavior and created trillion-dollar industries

Sometimes the hugest breakthroughs start as the tiniest solutions.

My friend Melina Palmer recently interviewed Bob Goodson, coauthor of LIKE: The Button That Changed the World, and discovered something fascinating about innovation.

The like button was never meant to change the world.

But it did.

It started at Yelp (not Facebook, as most people assume) as a simple way to make feedback easier. Instead of typing out a comment, you could just click once. That’s it.

No grand vision. No master plan to reshape human behavior.

Just one click instead of a typed message.

Yet here we are, billions of likes later, living in a world where that tiny thumbs-up has fundamentally altered how we interact, validate ourselves, and make purchasing decisions.

The genius was in removing friction at exactly the right moment.

Before the like button, giving feedback online required effort. You had to compose thoughts, worry about tone, decide if your opinion was worth sharing publicly.

The like button eliminated all that decision fatigue with a single, emotionally neutral gesture.

As Melina explains in her behavioral economics work, our brains make decisions in microseconds.

Even tiny hesitations like “Is this too much?” can stop behavior completely.

A heart might feel too intimate. A star might suggest ranking. But a thumbs-up? Casual, easy, and emotionally safe.

That’s behavioral design at its finest — meeting people exactly where they are and nudging them gently forward.

In I Need That, I discuss how successful products succeed by aligning with natural human psychology rather than fighting it. The like button perfectly exemplifies this principle.

But here’s what most people miss: the like button didn’t just change engagement — it created entirely new industries.

Suddenly, social proof became visible and measurable. Brands started chasing likes as currency. The influencer economy exploded because digital validation became trackable and monetizable.

Entire careers now exist around optimizing for behaviors that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

Product Payoff: Amazon’s one-click purchasing applies the same friction-removal principle to buying decisions. By eliminating the multiple steps, form fields, and decision points that normally slow down purchases, they transformed impulse buying from occasional behavior into a daily habit.

That little wee UX decision has generated hundreds of billions in additional revenue by meeting customers’ dog brain desire for immediate gratification without engaging their tank brain’s tendency to reconsider.

Your friction audit:

Look at your customer journey and identify moments where people hesitate or abandon the process. What’s the smallest possible action you could create that moves them forward without overwhelming their decision-making capacity?

Sometimes the most powerful product changes feel almost invisible because they work with human psychology instead of against it.

I’ll be appearing on Melina’s Brainyhttp://Thebrainybusiness.com/podcast Business podcast soon to explore more of these behavioral insights that drive product success. She’s a kindred spirit in understanding how small psychological shifts create massive business outcomes.

What’s the tiniest friction point that’s costing you the most customers?

Hit that reply arrow and share your “like button moment” — where removing one small barrier could unlock big results.

Or reach out to my team of product marketing experts at Graphos Product.