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I ran across an extreme example of this recently trying to track down an old acquaintance: the website mylife dot com. There was a street address of the person

I ran across an extreme example of this recently trying to track down an old acquaintance: the website mylife dot com. There was a street address of the person but if I wanted their email address it was like 10 minutes of progress bars before finally being asked for money. I didn't wait and didn't pay, but was mesmerized and intrigued by how much UI/UX investment had been made and how profitable the endeavor must be to merit such efforts. Also made me very sad knowing how many people must have been scammed out of money. Or maybe the paid reports serve some valuable purpose. I think the former.

blackearl 6y ago
All of those "lookup X person" sites do the same thing. You may assume that you've sunk so much time waiting for them to scan all their data, surely it's worth a few dollars to see the results.
MacsHeadroom 6y ago
Those sites can be worthwhile and there's nothing necessarily scammy about the UI/UX IMHO. The scammy part is where they push you into a nearly impossible to cancel subscription with promotional pricing as a way of "saving" vs an expensive one-time payment for one report. The loading bar UI/UX correctly gives the impression that the report will be thorough. In my experience, they are quite good. So that's just fine.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > The loading bar UI/UX correctly gives the impression that the report will be thorough. In my experience, they are quite good. So that's just fine. The loading bar is lying, plain and simple. "Giving the impression" of something that very much isn't true is just a polite way of saying "screwing with your user's perception of reality". Developers often complain that users cannot at all understand computers - these kinds of practices are part of the reason that is the case. It's not that far conceptually from the tech support scammers that show you errors in your system's Event Log to "give the impression" that you're insecure, and then offer to sell you bogus security products at inflated markup. Same kind of ethics underneath.
quesera 6y ago
Additional fun examples (artificial projections of expected behaviour, for the purpose of human familiarity or trust): - The "Checking for Audit Risk" progress bar in TurboTax/etc software, which is shown while comparing about a dozen floating point values, perhaps after a division step. This takes imperceptable time, but the appearance of "doing work" projects value to humans. - Comfort Noise (very low volume pseudo white noise) played into a VOIP phone to replicate the ambient inductive noise in analog lines. This assures humans that their handset is not broken. - Engine Noise generated by some (nearly silent) electric vehicles. This has a huge safety component, so it's not frivolous at all!

blackearl 6y ago

All of those "lookup X person" sites do the same thing. You may assume that you've sunk so much time waiting for them to scan all their data, surely it's worth a few dollars to see the results.

MacsHeadroom 6y ago

Those sites can be worthwhile and there's nothing necessarily scammy about the UI/UX IMHO. The scammy part is where they push you into a nearly impossible to cancel subscription with promotional pricing as a way of "saving" vs an expensive one-time payment for one report. The loading bar UI/UX correctly gives the impression that the report will be thorough. In my experience, they are quite good. So that's just fine.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> The loading bar UI/UX correctly gives the impression that the report will be thorough. In my experience, they are quite good. So that's just fine. The loading bar is lying, plain and simple. "Giving the impression" of something that very much isn't true is just a polite way of saying "screwing with your user's perception of reality". Developers often complain that users cannot at all understand computers - these kinds of practices are part of the reason that is the case. It's not that far conceptually from the tech support scammers that show you errors in your system's Event Log to "give the impression" that you're insecure, and then offer to sell you bogus security products at inflated markup. Same kind of ethics underneath.

quesera 6y ago

Additional fun examples (artificial projections of expected behaviour, for the purpose of human familiarity or trust): - The "Checking for Audit Risk" progress bar in TurboTax/etc software, which is shown while comparing about a dozen floating point values, perhaps after a division step. This takes imperceptable time, but the appearance of "doing work" projects value to humans. - Comfort Noise (very low volume pseudo white noise) played into a VOIP phone to replicate the ambient inductive noise in analog lines. This assures humans that their handset is not broken. - Engine Noise generated by some (nearly silent) electric vehicles. This has a huge safety component, so it's not frivolous at all!