The Guilt Trip As A User Interface Element
Everything from mailing list opt-outs to ad blockers is now designed to give you a guilt trip.
"No thanks, I'm not interested in protecting my skin." —Elle.com
Thus far, 2016 is shaping up to be the year of a new and terrifying phase of the user interface design: the shame and guilt spiral as a feature.
Freud believed that it was during the latency stage of psychosexual growth of a child (approximately between toddlerhood and puberty) that shame and guilt entered their awareness and became motivating emotions. To believe that the UI is at that point, we have to believe that we have already passed toddlerhood with its Oedipal complexes, been weaned from our mother's teat, and put to rest our fixations on poop. To be fair, I am not sure if the internet will ever be over DILFs, boobs, and poop jokes, but I do believe there is clear evidence we are moving in this direction.
Last year, Facebook changed the response options to its events to reflect the guilt that these damned invites have caused us to feel for years. Instead of just a firm "No," the option is now "Can't go." It's making your polite excuse for you. The option to let someone know you will never ever go to their DJ night/poetry slam/dog birthday because you just don't WANT to no longer exists. In this case, Facebook is removing the guilt you might feel for declining the invitation. You'd love to, you just can't make it.
On the other hand, take the ad blocker. Many of us would prefer to never see ads. We hate ads! But, of course, that's what keeps the lights on at media websites. Which is why some websites seem to be turning to guilt to get you to turn those ad blockers off: Please, don't you want our site to be able to thrive?
This guilt strat isn't just locked in the primordial garden of several argumentative Medium thinkpieces. It is actually built into sites themselves. It manifests as cute little images that appear on various sites when they detect readers have ad blockers turned on. On Twitter, people recently complained that Forbes was strategically shaming them with Martin Shkreli quotes (clearly designed to torture the ad-blocking reader into madness). But other sites like GQ.com go with a more straightforward guilt-inducing approach.
via BuzzFeed - Tech http://ift.tt/23jpWHo
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments: