The Seven Deadly Sins of UX – Greed
Recently, I listened to an album that led me to look at the Seven Deadly Sins within UX. The Deadly Sins I will discuss are: Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. In a previous post, I already talked about Gluttony and Lust. This time we’ll look at Greed. The other Deadly Sins will be discussed in future posts.
Just to be clear: everyone is guilty of these, it’s human. Probably not to the extreme degree I describe here. It’s not meant to bring down specific people or companies. It’s more of a reminder, for when it’s needed.
Greed
The next sin is Greed, always wanting more and more. Here, I particularly look at applications that are more interested in the user’s money than the experience itself. This often goes hand in hand with so-called dark patterns. Dark patterns are ways to deceive your users into doing what you want. To learn more about this, you can visit this website: Deceptive Design.
It’s even so bad that some dark patterns are banned within the EU. You must always be transparent about your cookies and what you use them for.
A fairly well-known example of a dark pattern, which to my knowledge is not illegal, can be found on booking.com. I won’t list all the ways, as that could be an article in itself, but you can read more about it here: Booking.com Manipulation, Bad UX: How Booking.com Deceives Clients, Deceptive Design: Booking.com.
The dark pattern I want to talk about is the level of fictional urgency used by booking. If you just look at a hotel, you get offers everywhere that are almost gone because it’s popular. So act quickly, don’t look elsewhere for a better price, because here you have the jackpot that is also halved, especially for you. But be quick because in the last half hour, 3 rooms have been sold, and there are only 2 left now.
This is the sin I can’t stand the most: UX-ers/designers/researchers using their knowledge to make a million-dollar company more money. Michael Jordan once said it best:
In my opinion, it is also the responsibility of the UX-er that the user is not manipulated into acting quickly. This is probably easier said than done, but there should also be resistance to these kinds of ideas.
By Jasper Blikman, Consultant and UX specialist