Blogless: Blog of Design Less Better.

Posts tagged Chicanery.

Assume your users are smarter than you are

Sometimes the simplest advice needs reiteration: Don't lie or omit relevant information on your website. It reflects badly on your brand.

Since your website is an important part of your brand, you've got to think about the content of the former as representative of the latter. You've just got to. To a potential consumer online, what your brand represents is nothing more than the content of your website. This means that if that content fails or is unconsidered in any significant (or, in fact, even in any seemingly insignificant) ways, your brand is in danger of representing this failure.

Given this framework, some decisions that may seem like good strategic ideas are in fact bad. The reason for this is an assumption on your part about your ability to provide a coherent semblance of total information, while at the same time actually providing either partial or exaggerated information. In a word, you're trying to trick, omit key information from, or (even worse) lie to your users. And it's not going to work.

Screen capture from Mr. Show episode 04x06: 'It's insane, this guy's taint'
"You guys don't have to trick me! You're my friends!"
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
PaulOct 13, 2008