1. Nevolution: This is a mental public health issue

Image credit: Daniel Neville

Daniel Neville has penned a thoughtful piece about the ethical implications of video games that manipulate us and how these mechanics are holding back the artistic potential of the medium.

...[G]ame designers are using evolutionary needs for rewards and goals to cheapen the game playing experience. If there were no golden coins to collect, or princesses to solve, would the game still be playable? [Braid designer Jonathan Blow] made a big point about comparing the simple and addictive (yet ultimately empty) rewards based system of World of Warcraft to gorging on fast food...Blow questions if game designers have been designing games to exploit the need for fitness indicators and affordances. Rewards can be like food (naturally beneficial) or like drugs (artificial stimuli and the illusion of fitness indicators), games over use the drugs because they don't understand how to make a food.

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1. Webtrendmap

The top slot this week goes to the Webtrendmap beta. Essentially, it aggregates the top re-blogged stories from trusted sources, so you get only the cream of the crop.

I like it so far because the trusted sites seem to be weighted towards designers and, in the limited time I've spent with the site, their picks seem pretty good.

Also, the interface is unique. As I understand it, you can make your own "maps", plotting trends across two axes or even locations. I confess, I'm not sure how that part works, but it's intriguing.

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1. Packaging Design at Its Worst

Treehugger has a gallery of packaging designs that are wasteful and, in one case, downright dangerous.

2. What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter

One of the better articles I've read on making effective use of Twitter. I appreciate the fact that the authors use real tweets as examples instead of simply making broad, unsupported generalizations.

3. Want more sign-ups? Don't lead with "Free" offers

In user testing, 37signals found that a call-to-action button with the copy "See Plans and Pricing" resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups over variations on "Sign-up for a Free Trial".

It seems that people are weary of "free" things online as they are often a gateway to unwanted subscriptions and opt-out schemes.

4. How to Monetize a Free Service

Okay, that title's a bit misleading.

But we could learn something from the actions of Pandora CEO Tim Founder on how to make the move from free to freemium. Founder broke the news to his customers in a sensitive and well-reasoned letter that's worth reading.

Make a great service and treat your customers like intelligent people. That's something we can all subscribe to.

We’ve been talking this week about the little things in design, those small pieces that must come together to create the big experience. When they go AWOL, customers get frustrated. As I wrote on Tuesday, no hardware; no bookshelf.

Yesterday, Paul mentioned a few things designers could do to prevent or mitigate the damage from missing parts. In today’s post, I want to draw attention to his second white-hat solution: using standardized parts in designs.

There are a lot of non-standard parts floating around today’s designs: strange battery types; odd Scandinavian screws; hacky code. These may allow the designer more freedom (or just make their job easier), but they take freedom away from the end-user.

If a customer can’t wait for the company to respond with a missing part, they should be able to go to the store and quickly get a replacement. Whenever possible, using standardized parts instead of that 15/16? septagonal bolt is bound to save the day even when your company can’t.

But standards alone aren’t enough. It is possible to use standardized pieces that customers can’t understand and/or easily replace at the store. I’m talking about proprietary standards.

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I spent Monday griping about those little bags of screws that come with Target DIY pressboard bookshelves and their like. I also intimated then that the (if not flatly unethical) lame strategies behind them have a couple of lessons to teach us all: Wordpress template factories, real estate agents, Etsy store proprietors, and big three automotive companies alike. As promised:

Be generous

Send me an extra screw, you jerks. (Image via.)

If you make design and logistical decisions using a mentality of maximizing profits, the logical conclusions will all have zero tolerance for error. Case in point the bag of hardware: There is no doubt that sending exactly the correct amount of hardware is the most cost-effective option for these companies, which is why that's what they do. However, when the factory screws up, it costs them huge, leading to frustrated customers, employees, and balance sheets. If they had just planned to throw an extra washer in every bag, they wouldn't have any of these problems.

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On Monday, Paul wrote about the common nuisance of a missing bolt in a piece of self-assembled furniture. He argued that to cut costs, companies often give their customers only the minimal amount of fasteners needed to do the job. If there is any screw-up (no pun intended) and a piece gets left out, there is no room for error. Paul suggested that an ethical and cost-effective solution would be to just add a few extra pieces in the bag, as the cost of a few bolts would more than outweigh the cost of customer frustration and the resources spent correcting the error.

It seems to me that another reason why companies make mistakes like this is not merely because of cost, but simply because they don’t care that much about little things like nuts and bolts. A cracked or missing shelf gets most of the attention because it is easy to spot and expensive to replace, but a cheap bit of metal in a bag goes unnoticed.

Doing the right thing starts with the smallest thing. It doesn’t take much to ruin an experience. It’s happened to all of us, at one time or another: an expensive stereo with a remote that doesn’t come with batteries; a fancy bed-and-breakfast with no shampoo in the shower; no pickle with your sandwich. If that little thing was there as it should be, you’d probably never notice, but when it’s missing, the whole design gestalt can be compromised.

Step one, then, is not to overlook the nuts and bolts. No hardware, no bookshelf.

Step two is to ask: what’s your system for making sure the nuts and bolts are always there? And, if they’re missing, how quickly can that mistake be fixed?

I like Paul’s simple solution of adding more hardware, but for something that critical, there has to be a backup plan. Are there clear instructions on what to do if pieces go missing? Is it easy for the customer to ask for them? How quickly can they be replaced? Make it right; get the user experience back on track.

We can take a lesson from the Simpsons. When Lisa and Marge discover their Vincent Price’s Egg Magic is missing vital egg feet, they call the number on the box and Price’s grandson Jody promptly hand-delivers them. Now that’s design ethics in action!

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On Tuesday, I wrote about “opt-out” or “negative option” practices --okay, scams-- wherein customers unwittingly agree to subscription services which they are charged for in deliberately obfuscated ways. To get out of the arrangement, the customer has to explicitly state they do not want to be charged (this is easier said than done); hence, the opt-out moniker.

As white-hat designers, what can we learn from this unethical behavior?

Last time, we identified the common elements of an opt-out scam. Let’s see if doing the opposite can’t turn this around—and then some.

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