Comment by wanderingstan
7 years ago
A physical analog of this would be when an Houston airport reduced complaints by moving it's baggage claim to be farther away from gates. Would you call this deception?
Also: A friend runs a service that analyzes web page design based on tens of thousands of hours of human eye tracking studies. An analysis only takes a matter of milliseconds, but they found that their conversion rate went up if they artificially put in a delay. Again, I wouldn't call the delay a deception; but rather an accommodation of human perception where longer = harder, and thus more valuable.
In the same way most people can't reason about probability, most people also can't fathom how fast computers really are.
artificially put in a delay
Makes me wonder if online retailers for luxury/fashion items could increase sales by doing something similar.
Announce the latest fashion item via social media, but make the page take forever to load... maybe throw in a few fake 404s to a percentage of users saying the store's website is overloaded and encourage the user to refresh. Then when the page finally loads there's a limited supply left, and when they put the item in their cart there's a ticking timer because "X" other people are already shopping this item too. Maybe some other last-minute artificial constraints, like people can only check-out with AMEX.
So basically Ticketmaster for luxury goods, except you secretly always have enough in stock.
This really has nothing to do with luxury goods. This behavior occurs on a lot of e-commerce sites regardless of what they sell. Outside of established players these tactics are fairly common. At least TicketMaster has an excuse for the timer.
As far as I know a lot of travel and hotel websites actually work kind of like that.
Does anyone have more information on the Houston airport case? Because I can imagine how moving the baggage claim further from the gates could result in actual efficiency improvements if it's closer to the exit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/why-waiting...
Travel is all about mass human psychology management anyway - why do you get a meal on flights? Because people who've eaten are more docile, on average.
I feel like this phrasing makes it sound way more dystopian than it actually is. People who are tired or hungry are quicker to snap and notice the little discomforts of the plane. It's not that they're more docile, is that they're more content because it's easier to relax.
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> ... Houston airport reduced complaints by moving it's baggage claim to be farther away from gates. Would you call this deception?
nah man, that's just straight up Dark Patterns -- https://darkpatterns.org
Like when your 2nd-touch emails technically and legally have an Unsubscribe link, but it's the same color as the background. Or how installing the Yahoo search toolbar was an opt-out with each java update.