In the "fundamental tenets of design" thread, I had written as my third rule "Don't lie" (right after the similar "Show sleazebags the door."). I really believe that, and as interaction designers I think we run into this question far more often than we think.
Apparently lying to the user is fundamental to at least one business sector: Mobile phones. Mark Hurst writes [1] that mobile phone companies lie to their users in several pretty big ways: 1) The signal-strength bars on your phone usually exaggerate the strength of the signal. 2) The batter strength indicator also exaggerates the power left in your battery. Both lies serve the same purpose: To encourage people to use their phones. Apparently, people don't use their phones as much when the signal is weak or their battery is low, so by lying they drive up the minutes. Some people, including Mark, speculate that the carriers also use dreadfully long voicemail system messages to drive up minutes (ever call someone on Sprint? It takes 45 seconds to actually get to leave a message, which I suppose helps your provider, not Sprint necessarily -- maybe there's industry collusion there, too). Obviously all of these decisions are GREAT for business. I can easily imagine that if all of these practices were stopped, phone usage overall would decline by a few percentage points, which could make the difference between profitability and losing money for the company as a whole. And users don't seem to mind -- what they don't know doesn't hurt them, right? What do you think? Would you ever design a system this way, putting the business's needs above the user's needs? Even to the point of lying to the user? Those of you in the mobile device business, are you familiar with this practice? -Cf Christopher Fahey ____________________________ Behavior biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com me: http://www.graphpaper.com ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
