“The secret to getting ahead in the 21st century is capitalizing on people doing what they want to do, rather than trying to get them to do what you want to do.”
(Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, in a Wired article quoted at the Public Journalism network)
I think this applies very much to issues of control in products, systems and environments, in addition to the blogging context in which it was spoken, just so long as people are aware that there are alternatives available which do let them do what they want. eMusic exists, with a DRM-free format, but more people still use iTunes. Why?
As Cory Doctorow has so often put it, “No-one wakes up in the morning wanting to do less with his or her stuff.” It will be especially interesting to see how businesses built on the model Reynolds expresses fare in the years ahead. Is this really the secret to getting ahead? Will we really have companies and governments succeeeding by striving to help and empower people, or will the lure of increased control prove too attractive?
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Jason Kottke notes the now-near universal practice of splitting newspaper & magazine articles online into multiple pages:
“…it’s some sort of “best practice” that we readers let them get away with so they can boost pageviews and advertising revenue at the expense of user experience, but The New Yorker was the last bastion of good behavior on this issue and I loved them for it. This is a perfect example of an architecture of control in design and uninnovation.”
It does ring true: I almost routinely now click on ‘print-friendly version’ when reading articles online, regardless of whether I’m going to be printing them, just so that I get an uninterrupted page without having to wait for a new set of ads and peripheral clutter to load at multiple interruption points while reading the article. It also makes it a lot easier to save a copy (single file) rather than having to save multiple pages. Surely the advantage of reading online is that the page layout need not follow print media’s restrictions; so long as the article is mostly text it will be quick to download a long page.
Nevertheless, I can see that psychologically, an article which looks shorter may be glanced at by a casual reader – who may then become interested enough to continue – whereas one which looks longer may be ignored completely. This may be an additional explanation to the ‘increase page views therefore advertising revenue’ intention. I don’t know.
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Welcome, readers from Metafilter and del.icio.us.
One point raised in the Metafilter discussion is whether the term ‘architectures of control’ is a sensible one for this phenomenon, and whether ‘architectures of control in design’ is a good title for the blog. I understand the issue; it’s something (clearly) I considered at length when starting my research. It’s not an especially succinct title, and the use of the ‘architectures’ term is potentially a source of confusion (or irritation) if the link between the design of environments and the design of products and systems is not fully appreciated:
“Architecture is the design and construction of buildings… The noun is never pluralized, nor ever used as a verb, gag, except by the designers of computer software and hardware who needed to appropriate the term because they wanted to make their jobs sound more impressive. This kind of business school speak – always reaching for the most portentous word available when a simple one would do the job just fine – drives me nuts. That is one reason I have difficulty with the title of his blog.
The second is that it is a redundancy: Design of control in design.”
First time I’ve ever been accused of business school speak! But the term ‘architectures of control’ has been in reasonably wide use for a while before my research; from my own point of view, I originally borrowed it from chapter 4 of Lessig’s Code & Other Laws of Cyberspace, as the central thesis here is pretty much that Lessig’s ‘code is law’ principle – relating specifically to the way the internet is structured – applies equally to any product, system or environment with which a user interacts. Anything can be designed to enforce and restrict behaviour. Applying programming analogies to hardware, or architectural analogies to software, or other combinations, can be a useful way of allowing different disciplines to understand each other. Or so it would be nice to think!
But is there a better term than ‘architectures of control’? I’m completely open to suggestions.
Update (19th Sept): The term apparently has enough currency for eBay affiliates to buy Google Adwords using it, e.g.
…but then they’re not always noted for the most sensible key-phrase choices!
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Privacy International has a report, ‘Dumb Design or Dirty Tricks?‘ on the practice of a number of popular websites – most notably eBay and Amazon – of lacking an easy or obvious way for a user to delete his or her account:
“Amazon provided the most blatant example of companies that refuse to provide account delete facilities… creating an account is relatively simple… However nowhere on the site can a customer actually delete an account. A trawl through all the ‘useful information’ statements (‘customer charter’, ‘privacy notice’ and ‘privacy policy’, ‘security guarantee’ and even ‘sign out from our site’) reveals nothing about closing your account, deleting your personal details, or terminating your relationship with Amazon. Even the site’s search function is useless for this: you can only search for products for purchase, not for information on how to manage your account. In fact, a search for ‘delete account’ even points to advertisements from ‘sponsors’ on how to open bank accounts.”
It is, of course, in no way ‘dumb design’, as the omission and obfuscation is entirely intentional: it is cunning design, frustrating a user’s attempts at exerting control by making it hard to leave. Just look at the efforts another high-profile name goes to for customer retention. It’s another feature deletion example, similar in spirit to, say, disabling the fast-forward button on PVRs.
(It’s unclear exactly what the immediate benefit is to Amazon or eBay to retain customers who want to leave and presumably are not going to be spending any more, except that a bigger customer base allows higher advertising rates, and also, as noted by PI: “The size of an online company’s customer base is a key element of its market value. Maintaining growth of that customer base is therefore a core indicator of their financial worth”; I suppose there is also the likelihood that customers may return at some point, and having an extant account removes one ‘hassle’ barrier to entry.)
PI believes that the absence of an easy account closure mechanism:
“breach[es] key elements of the Data Protection Act. No customer could reasonably be expected to invest the considerable time and effort required to investigate these sites, nor in our view should any responsible company create such obstacles.
…
As a consequence of this research, Privacy International has lodged a complaint with the UK Information Commissioner, requesting a formal investigation. This will be a test complaint, and has been directed at eBay.co.uk, which claims a user base of over ten million UK consumers.”
These are interesting examples of systems being designed to restrict users’ behaviour for commercial reasons, in an – on the face of it – extremely blatant way. There is some difference between a system which requires continuous payment, such as AOL, being designed to be difficult to cancel, and the eBay/Amazon examples, since the user is not locked in to paying a fee every month. But the effect for the locker-in is the same: more customers retained. There are plenty of parallels in designed-in lock-ins from other industries, from cigarettes and ink cartridges to deliberate software incompatability – even in Web 2.0 – and vendor lock-in generally.
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