Evil By Design?

More persuasive technology, this time from the usability sector with “evil by design“, a site that was created to accompany the 2008 Nielsen Norman Group conferences. The site deals with “purposefully designed interfaces” in the second sense of my earlier post, getting users to do what you want rather than what they want. The techniques for bring this about are based around the idea of engendering emotional involvement in the user that is directed towards your aims rather than theirs. This is achieved via seven group of techniques named after the seven deadly sins:

1. Sloth – Because users are lazy you can get them to do something by providing the least resistance along the path that you want as opposed to alternative paths.
2. Pride – Take advantage of a users desire to be more important or attractive than others (or conversely their fear of not being important or attractive).
3. Envy – Get the user to desire something possess by someone else
4. Greed – Play upon the desire of users to get “something for nothing”, or at least appear to. For most companies it is not desirable to reduce the cost of a transation to zero but you can play upon that desire by reducing the cost of some aspect of the transaction, e.g. shipping fees, if only they do something for you, e.g. minimum purchase size.
5. Lust – The success of the “I Love You” email virus is sufficient testament to the power of lust. In terms of persuading users you need to provide a way for them to tell you their hearts desire, then sell it back to them.
6. Wrath – Judicious use of a users anger, if you already have them over a barrel can be useful. For example, if a user has to fill in a long and complicated form but you know that they will tend to want to minimise the amount that they have to fill in, you could give less feedback about the mandatory fields. After the form is rejected the first time, and assuming that it is important enough, the user will make sure to complete every part of the form so as not to waste their own time. A risky one this, but I am sure that many governmental forms are designed with this type of influence in mind. Your tax-return is too important to not complete correctly so after being told to fill in the mandatory fields but not being told which are actually mandatory, a user may complete fields that are not mandatory but desirable information nonetheless, because the process is too important to mess up.
7. Gluttony – Take advantage of your users overconsumption. The example is rather tenuous compared with some of the others, but on the web many users now use pop-up blockers to block advertising whilst they continue to browse. As a result many sites now use hyperlinks that either lead to advertisements or do mouse-over pop-ups of advertisements, or keywords are automatically turned into links that advertise products (or link to those products).

I think that this is an interesting approach to categorising various techniques for doing persuasive technology. By being able to group persuasive techniques like this we can more easily inform users of the ways in which they are lead to make decisions that they might not otherwise make. I still feel that one of the best techniques for avoiding being mislead is that of being aware of the range of techniques that might be used against you. Rather than having a long exhaustive list of these techniques instead we have a limited number of categories with specific examples of how the techniques can be applied. This is akin to the approach I use when teaching argumentation and critical thinking, in that sometimes the best way to defend yourself against rhetorical techniques is to be aware that they exist. For example, once a person is made aware of the technique of arguing against a person’s character rather than their arguments then they are more likely to point out that their opponent has addresses their argument. Before they are aware of this technique however, many people are more likely to respond in kind and the quality of argumentation is reduced and often never recovers during that dialogue.