Have you ever walked into a supermarket, pharmacy, or department store looking to buy a specific item, only to find the layout confusing? Perhaps you ended up aimlessly strolling around, purchasing other items? This is deliberate, and known as the Gruen Transfer.

The 'Transfer' part is the moment that you, as a consumer surrounded by a deliberately confusing layout, lose track of your original intentions.

It first appeared on Facebook with the apparition of the feed. [...] "The last time I checked Facebook, maybe 10% of my feed was updates from friends."

In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling.

In french, l'effet Gruen