Great example, Eric! (not just about defaults, but resetting
defaults...almost evil)
Here's another interesting tidbit concerning influence, care of Steve
Jobs of Apple.
"It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and
it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t.
We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having
the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people
are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do."
I wrote up a bit more here:
http://bokardo.com/archives/steve-jobs-on-why-apple-doesnt-do-market-research/
Josh
On Jul 29, 2009, at 7:49 AM, Eric Reiss wrote:
Fascinating discussion. Let me share something that I do believe is
truly unethical.
I've been talking with the webmaster for several porn sites to learn
more about streaming video. She (yes, she) told me a creepy story
about
how one site coerces new subscribers to submit to the recurring
monthly
charge rather than the one-time-only three-day sample period. In other
words, rather than paying a one-time fee of USD 9.95, your credit card
gets billed USD 29.95 each and every month.
Here's how the scam works.
On the sign-up form, you check which payment period you want.
There is a really goofy field on the form that is almost always filled
out wrong. For ethical reasons, I'm not going to go into details. But
surely you are all clever enough to design a bad form of your own.:-)
When you submit the form, it points out your error. What most people
miss is that the checkbox for payment period has been reset. So folks
correct the highlighted error and submit - but without reviewing their
data.
The site sends a confirmation e-mail where the amended payment period
information is innocuously mentioned. That means when you complain,
the
company can refer to their original confirmation e-mail - "If there
are
any errors in your order, please report them to us within the next 24
hours." Virtually no one notices the error - they're too busy
looking at
tits and ass.
So, the company has suckered 29.95 out of people instead of 9.95. And
apparently most people don't react until the second month is well
underway.
The funny thing is, I regularly run into dumb forms that reset things
when I need to correct an entry. Since money is rarely involved, I
just
get irritated. But in generic terms, this is almost the same thing.
For
example, try registering for the German social networking site
www.mixxt.net <http://www.mixxt.net/> . It's really easy to make
errors
and some stuff gets reset, if I remember correctly.
Conclusion: as the guardians of user-experience design, we have an
obligation to protect users.
Cheers,
Eric
-----------------------
Eric Reiss
CEO
The FatDUX Group
Copenhagen, Denmark
http://www.fatdux.com
office: (+45) 39 29 67 77
mobile: (+45) 20 12 88 44
skype: ericreiss
twitter: @elreiss
FatDUX is an official sponsor of the
Usability Professionals' Association
http://www.upassoc.org
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