The discussion started when a fellow UI designer said that she was proud of working "making people lives better" as opposed to our fellows at the advertising dept, all day long "cheating people" ;-)
We all know that advertising IS somehow evil, but are we UX people, without sin? Could UX be a tool for manipulating people? If so, how?
Answer
I think what you're asking about is Persuasion Design, which aims to influence the user's actions in a way that brings benefit primarily to the business, rather than the user.
I think if we're honest, a lot of us do this every day - making changes with the aim of increasing a conversion rate. Usually this is of most benefit to the business, but the user is hopefully still getting what they want - you've just made it a little easier for them to do so.
Ultimately, there's a line between what is acceptable and what is not:
- Promoting a particular course of action by explaining the benefits and making it easy to follow, is perfectly acceptable
- Manipulating a user to do something that is against their interests and serves only to maximise profit for the business, is not
I would hope that as user-centred designers we are empathic and altruistic enough to steer away from the latter, but of course it's often not us that has the final say…
I'm going to go with a modified version of Google's motto:
"Don't be evil. Or at least do as little evil as you can without getting fired."
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