Evil by Design E-Book

Chris Nodder

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

How to make customers feel good about doing what you want

Learn how companies make us feel good about doing what they want. Approaching persuasive design from the dark side, this book melds psychology, marketing, and design concepts to show why we’re susceptible to certain persuasive techniques. Packed with examples from every nook and cranny of the web, it provides easily digestible and applicable patterns for putting these design techniques to work. Organized by the seven deadly sins, it includes:

• Pride — use social proof to position your product in line with your visitors’ values
• Sloth — build a path of least resistance that leads users where you want them to go
• Gluttony — escalate customers’ commitment and use loss aversion to keep them there
• Anger — understand the power of metaphysical arguments and anonymity
• Envy — create a culture of status around your product and feed aspirational desires
• Lust — turn desire into commitment by using emotion to defeat rational behavior
• Greed — keep customers engaged by reinforcing the behaviors you desire

Now you too can leverage human fallibility to create powerful persuasive interfaces that people will love to use — but will you use your new knowledge for good or evil? Learn more on the companion website, evilbydesign.info.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Credits

About the Author

About the Technical Editor

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

Evil designs and their virtuous counterparts

Pride

Misplaced pride causes cognitive dissonance

Social proof: Using messages from friends to make it personal and emotional

Closure: The appeal of completeness and desire for order

Manipulating pride to change beliefs

Sloth

Sloth: Is it worth the effort?

Gluttony

Deserving our rewards

Escalating commitment: foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face

Invoking gluttony with scarcity and loss aversion

Anger

Avoiding anger

Embracing anger

Using anger safely in your products

Envy

Manufacturing envy through desire and aspiration

Status envy: demonstrating achievement and importance

Manufacturing and maintaining envy in your products

Lust

Creating lust: Using emotion to shape behavior

Controlling lust: Using desire to get a commitment

Lustful behavior

Greed

Learning from casinos: Luck, probability, and partial reinforcement schedules

Anchoring and arbitrary coherence

Evil by Design

Should you feel bad about deception?

Should you feel bad about using the principles in this book?

Be purposefully persuasive

The Persuasive Patterns Game

Pride

Sloth

Gluttony

Anger

Envy

Lust

Greed

References

About the Technical Editor

Introduction

Pride

Sloth

Gluttony

Anger

Envy

Lust

Greed

Summary

Foreword

Sloth, Pride, Envy, Greed, Lust, Anger, Gluttony. What? I’m supposed to design for these traits? As a human-centered designer, I should be repelled by the thought of designing for such a list. What was Chris Nodder thinking? What was his publisher thinking? This is evil, amplified.

Although, come to think of it, those seven deadly sins are human traits. Want to know how people really behave? Just read the law books. Start with one of the most famous set of laws of all, the Ten Commandments. Every one of those commandments is about something that people actually did, and then prohibiting it. All laws are intended to stop or otherwise control human behavior. So, if you want to understand real human behavior, just see what the laws try to stop. The list of seven deadly sins provides a nice, tidy statement of fundamental human behavior, fundamental in the sense that from each of the deadly sins, one can derive a large list of less deadly ones.

But why should design be based on evil? Simple: Starting with evil means starting with real human behavior. This doesn’t mean that the result is evil: It means that understanding what each sin represents adds to an understanding of people. And good design results from good understanding. This is Chris Nodder’s great insight: Human frailty provides a great learning experience, illustrative examples that teach fundamental principles. And just as all fundamental principles can be used for good or evil, Nodder’s principles can be used in either way.

There are obvious benefits to society in using the lessons learned from the sins to enhance design processes for the good of humankind. But there are also benefits to understanding how those who are less scrupulous than you or me use these same principles for nefarious purposes, defrauding people, or perhaps just causing them to buy things they do not need at a price they cannot afford. What possible benefits? The more the tactics are understood, the more readily they can be identified and resisted, fought against, and defeated.

Nodder has done a superb job of distilling and explaining. Fun to read, insightful to contemplate. Maybe he did too good a job—I am now far better equipped to do evil than I was before I read the book. But I’m also better equipped to notice when others apply these principles to me; and they do, many times a day, as I browse the Internet, click links, or wander the streets of my little town in the Philistine area called Silicon Valley; resisting temptations of greed, lust, and gluttony as I watch the natives feeding at outdoor cafes; buying at fancy glass-encased stores selling tantalizing electronic sin toys; passing the offices of venture capitalists along the way, with fancy, unimaginably expensive and powerful automobiles parked in front (in a city where the speed limit is 25 miles per hour, and it is rare to go even that fast). Which sins are on constant display? Every one of them.

The seven sins are all around us, easy to spot. But the designs that apply the underlying behavioral forces that underpin the sins are harder to discern. That’s why we need this book.

Thank you Chris for providing insight coupled with fun. Teaching deep insights into human behavior together with valuable guidelines and frameworks for applying them is a blessing—57 blessings, one for each design pattern that Nodder has derived from the seven sins. Learning from sins. Pleasure from sins. A wonderful combination.

So yes, buy the book. No, don’t download it for free: That would be sinful.

Don Norman

Nielsen Norman group

Author of Design of Everyday Things

Palo Alto, California

Introduction

In Mark Twain’s classic book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Sawyer convinces others to do his work for him by making the chore of painting a fence seem instead a desirable job. His friends beg to be involved.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876

Designers work hard to control the emotions and behaviors of their users. Truly great websites—good or evil—use specific techniques to get users to perform the desired task time and time again. Success in web design is most often measured in terms of how many users beg to be involved; creating, sharing, commenting, or purchasing.

Evil designs and their virtuous counterparts

Design is about persuasion. Marketers first codified many of these persuasive behaviors in the mid-1930s. It took until the turn of the century for economic researchers and psychologists to work out why people respond to these behaviors in the way they do. Now you can learn how to apply this knowledge in interaction design.

Sites capitalize on our weaknesses. Sometimes their intentions are good, but mainly they do this for “evil”—in other words to profit at our expense. The best sites manage to make us feel good at the same time.

Learning from the best

Controlling people’s behavior for financial gain is not a new concept. Casinos do it, politicians do it, and marketers do it. Here, we consider human foibles and the manner in which they can be exploited into the digital age: How do we influence behavior through the medium of software?

We will draw many examples from existing apps and websites. The creators of these products may have been unaware of the psychological underpinnings of their design decisions. Indeed, they may not have intended to be truly evil in their implementations. However, the end results are often wonderful advertisements for evil by design.

Like a good magic trick, the best examples are the ones where you don’t even realize that people are being manipulated until it’s pointed out to you. When you understand the reasons why users respond the way they do, you’ll appreciate even more how clever some of these “tricks” actually are and marvel at the beauty of some of the evil designs.

Defining evil design

We must differentiate between evil design and plain stupidity. Often, a lazy or ill-thought-out design can infuriate us. However, it takes a truly well-conceived evil design to make us come back for more.

Stupidity isn’t evil. People who create bad designs because they don’t know any better or because they are lazy aren’t being evil. Evil design must be intentional. In fact, as you’ll see in the various chapters, there is often a lot of planning involved in creating an evil design that truly works.

The idea behind evil design is that people enter willingly into the deal, even when the terms are exposed to them. Confidence tricksters are another group who control behavior for gain, but they take things a stage further than evil design by hiding the true outcome of the activity.

Stupidity is sloppily coded error messages that don’t explain what’s wrong, or how to fix it. Those dialog boxes are frustrating but benign. A con is software that promises to remove viruses but instead infects your computer. This is evil masquerading as good—and if users manage to see behind the mask, they will be dismayed. Evil design works on a different level, by convincing customers that the value proposition is in their best interest (financially or emotionally) and by persuading customers to participate even if they are aware of the imbalance in the outcome.

So evil design is that which creates purposefully designed interfaces that make users emotionally involved in doing something that benefits the designer more than them.

Human weakness: The seven deadly sins, and how sites leverage them

It seems only fitting to lay out the contents of this book according to the vices that sites exploit to attract and engage with users. Thus, the subsequent chapters group design techniques under the headings of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Throughout history, philosophers and religious scholars have categorized human weakness as a set of “sins.” The Seven Deadly (unforgivable) Sins are Pride, Sloth, Gluttony, Anger, Envy, Lust, and Greed. Each chapter in this book addresses one of these sins, pointing out the human characteristics that enable software designers to create persuasive interfaces that appeal to each weakness. Using examples from contemporary web design, you will be able to see how the sin is exploited both for good and for evil. Each characteristic is accompanied by design patterns that give you simple rules to apply these same techniques in your own work.

This book concludes with a discussion about ethics. Not the heart-wrenching moral dilemma of whether to use any of these evil-by-design patterns, but instead an acceptance that they are being used already today. Knowing how to recognize these patterns enables you to turn them to your advantage both as a consumer and as a designer of software and websites.

Pride

Humility makes men like angels; Pride turns angels into devils.

Saint Augustine

Pride isn’t the sin it used to be. In the 4th Century, Evagrius of Pontus claimed that pride was the primary sin among the seven, and the one from which all others stemmed. By the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century, it was seen in a more measured manner—some pride was acceptable, but a surfeit was still a sin. In the 21st century, with the advent of social media, it appears that we more often ask, “Have you no pride?” when confronted with yet more drunken party photos, as if pride is a positive attribute that arbitrates in matters of taste.

These days, the sense in which pride is bad is probably best summed up by the word hubris—arrogance, loss of touch with reality, overestimating one’s capabilities, thinking that you can do no wrong. In the Greek tragedies, hubris leads the hero to pick a fight with the gods and thus be punished with death for his insolence. These days, it’s called overextending your credit.

Of course, the aim in this book isn’t to bemoan the lack of humility in modern society but to see how sites leverage this human weakness.

Misplaced pride causes cognitive dissonance

Harold Camping, the owner of familyradio.com, has been wrong a couple of times in the past. He predicted that the world would end on May 21, 1988—then again on September 7, 1994, and subsequently on May 21, 2011, before settling for October 21, 2011. After the world steadfastly refused to stop turning on each of these dates, you’d think that Harold would call it quits and stop believing that the Rapture was imminent. You’d also think that the large number of his followers who sold or gave away all their possessions or spent their life savings on advertisements for the event(s) would be embarrassed or upset. Although a small minority expressed disappointment each time, most continued to believe Harold. Why?

It’s all about how the brain manages to rationalize or resolve two conflicting concepts: a state called cognitive dissonance. For example, people know that smoking kills, but they continue to smoke. These dissonant thoughts don’t work well together. People resolve the issue by removing one of the two conflicting concepts. Quitting tobacco is much harder than rationalizing that smoking is unlikely to kill you because you are a healthy individual, and anyway, everyone dies of something. In other words, changing your opinion (that smoking can kill you) is much easier than changing your behavior (smoking). So the dissonance is resolved by rationalizing your opinions, even if that leaves you believing something strange.

In Harold’s case, each time he could demonstrate how his calculations (based on interpretation of scripture) had been slightly wrong. By admitting a small personal failing, he managed to refocus his followers’ actions around the new date. For his followers, it was much easier to accept that their leader had forgotten to add a couple of years in his equation than to believe that their Rapture-targeted behaviors were misaligned or even laughable. The deeper they were involved in Harold’s prophecies, the more pride they had at stake, the more cognitive dissonance they had to resolve, and so the more likely they would be to grasp on to any explanation that Harold could provide.