Lesson #2 from the Dark Side of Usability

It’s finally official: usability can be used for evil.

I’ve always suspected this to be true. After all, even the most innocuous of items””children’s toys””recently were transformed into agents for evil, so how could so powerful a concept as usability not be turned to the dark side? But now Jakob Nielsen has made the full evil potential of usability public knowledge in his recent Banner Blindness research report.

OK, I admit I’m a little puzzled at Jakob’s dramatic tone. Is this really news? Is the manipulative capacity of usability really surprising to anyone? And even if so, isn’t there a larger, more important message here than the awesome power of banner ads?

I mean, one doesn’t have to look far for examples of truly scary technologies out there, and people doing their best to forestall abuse by publicizing and educating on them.

Scarier things, by far, than banner ads

For instance, here’s a technology with clear potential for both good and evil: facial morphing.

Back in 2005, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Shanto Iyengar, & Nick Yee of the Stanford Virtual Reality lab conducted a study titled “Facial Identity Capture and Presidential Candidate Preference.”

The question posed was whether morphing a Presidential candidate’s face so it looks slightly like, say, my face, would increase my preference for that candidate. So, in other words, would a slightly Sandra-looking George Bush be more appealing to me, assuming my mind wasn’t already made up one way or the other?

The answer was YES. Evidently, we humans strongly prefer people who resemble us.

The scary part of this study, though, is that NO-ONE detected the morph. Each study participant thought they were seeing a plain photo of the candidates.

Imagine, if you will, the hellish combination of an evil-optimized banner ad (one that follows the anti-recommendations in Jakob’s post) coupled with an animated sales avatar, say from a company like SitePal, morphed to look like you. And how does it know what you look like? It did some realtime research, grabbed a photo off your IM account, or your blog, or Flickr. Or you have a webcam hooked up and turned on, and it captured your face that way.

However it managed to get your photo, the result would be devastatingly effective.

Not only would your eyes be reeled helplessly to the banner ad, you’d be unable to resist the sales pitch of the virtual being who looks so… familiar, somehow.

My, that’s an outstanding argument for buying a Lear jet, and I don’t believe I’ve ever met such a well-spoken, attractive salesperson. Where do I wire money?

Whoa. Now there’s something to worry about. Top that for scary, Jakob.

(Here’s an avatar that looks ever-so-vaguely like me. Similar enough that I’m already feeling the pull… She has a much bigger office than I do, though.)