[00:51.540 --> 00:54.940]  Okay, before we get started I have some administrative announcements.
[00:57.380 --> 01:01.260]  Sign up for the fourth track in Zeus and at 2 p.m.
[01:01.840 --> 01:04.540]  there will be relationship hacking in Zeus.
[01:05.700 --> 01:08.740]  Please set your cell phones to vibrate or off.
[01:10.020 --> 01:14.100]  There's lots to see and do in the pavilion and I guess that's on the second floor.
[01:15.740 --> 01:19.400]  DVD sales of all talks in the vendor area on the 18th floor.
[01:19.840 --> 01:21.580]  So that's my hope contribution.
[01:24.660 --> 01:26.880]  So let's get rid of our little dancing friend here.
[01:36.870 --> 01:37.390]  Okay.
[01:38.730 --> 01:44.210]  Hi, I'm Greg Conti and hope to do several things with this talk.
[01:44.490 --> 01:56.350]  One is to raise awareness about how some... I'm sure you're aware of some of the obvious ways we're manipulated using interfaces, both on and off the desktop, but also to just kind of cover the range.
[01:57.630 --> 02:10.550]  To get some feedback and discuss a little bit about what countermeasures exist and what countermeasures don't exist, I think the idea of attacking the user through the interface is actually a very hard problem when you're fighting the designer.
[02:12.090 --> 02:17.950]  We're going to look at basically a catalog of evil usability.
[02:18.430 --> 02:25.930]  So different categories of ways people have been using to attack the user and I guess from attackers perspective their ideas.
[02:26.450 --> 02:29.050]  From the defenders perspective their things to help counter.
[02:30.370 --> 02:33.910]  And also look at ways to measure evil usability.
[02:34.370 --> 02:36.930]  So you've got this how evil is a given interface.
[02:37.270 --> 02:39.230]  So get some ideas and some feedback on that.
[02:41.810 --> 02:42.990]  So with that...
[02:44.390 --> 02:46.470]  So I'm here as a free citizen.
[02:46.470 --> 02:50.750]  I'm not here as a representative of any employer of mine or the United States government.
[02:53.270 --> 03:07.850]  So for those of you that have studied interface design, they're filled with great, great ideals about how to protect the user, how to help the user accomplish goals, minimize errors, interfaces are easy to learn, satisfying to use, things like that.
[03:08.030 --> 03:12.950]  But there's a whole subclass of interface designers that basically do the exact opposite.
[03:13.110 --> 03:16.270]  You could go line by line and do the inverse.
[03:16.950 --> 03:20.270]  And this is an example of a good interface.
[03:20.590 --> 03:23.430]  It came out of MIT Media Lab chat circles.
[03:24.070 --> 03:32.370]  And basically the interface design community come up with these guidelines, come up with these procedures, techniques to make better interfaces.
[03:32.710 --> 03:36.990]  All that happens are people are doing the opposite and attacking us all.
[03:37.210 --> 03:39.610]  I'm sure we've all encountered evil interfaces.
[03:40.930 --> 03:46.290]  So just to kind of draw a line around what I'm defining as an evil interface.
[03:46.290 --> 03:48.750]  It's something that's deliberately malicious.
[03:49.370 --> 03:58.070]  So it's designed to trick the user, mislead the user, and it acts counter to the goals of what you as the user are trying to accomplish.
[03:58.970 --> 04:01.830]  And you're fighting against the goals of the designer.
[04:02.010 --> 04:05.810]  So there's this adversarial interface design that's going on.
[04:07.390 --> 04:09.070]  And I'm excluding the idea.
[04:09.210 --> 04:13.630]  Your ideas of what bad design is will vary, but I chose a couple of personal favorites.
[04:14.430 --> 04:17.570]  Hamster dance and the rotating skulls.
[04:17.590 --> 04:19.010]  So those are my personal ones.
[04:19.130 --> 04:24.210]  So I'm not saying that evil interface design is what some people would call bad design.
[04:24.210 --> 04:25.750]  There has to be malicious intent.
[04:28.290 --> 04:30.090]  And it's an evolving problem.
[04:30.270 --> 04:32.770]  I mean, it occurs on and off the desktop.
[04:33.010 --> 04:36.530]  And most recently, and we've seen it in the web, it's every day, it's in our face.
[04:37.550 --> 04:41.650]  Started off with pop-ups, but pretty good countermeasures came into play there.
[04:41.810 --> 04:43.570]  But it's an evolving problem.
[04:43.630 --> 04:53.870]  And as I went out to try and catalog the different techniques people used, it went from just a small number of categories basically into an encyclopedia of evil usability.
[04:54.370 --> 04:58.670]  Basically, any way we can be manipulated that people have thought of, they're doing.
[04:58.950 --> 05:01.650]  So it's this extended techniques.
[05:01.910 --> 05:09.770]  And as new usability rules are developed, I bet people will invert those rules and use them to attack the user.
[05:10.890 --> 05:13.990]  So why are people doing this?
[05:14.050 --> 05:15.630]  What are the motivators of the attacker?
[05:15.770 --> 05:18.410]  And I'll call the attacker the interface designer.
[05:18.670 --> 05:24.730]  Well, most of it comes down to profit, either immediate profit or some chain of events that leads to profit.
[05:26.710 --> 05:31.490]  You know, making sales, directing, you know, a lot of it revolves around advertising, at least on the web.
[05:31.810 --> 05:36.690]  And say the gas station involves buying premium gas instead of the less expensive gas.
[05:36.990 --> 05:42.230]  But there are also other legal implications, such as helping protect your intellectual property.
[05:42.850 --> 05:46.790]  Or if any of you have encountered goatse on the web.
[05:47.990 --> 05:52.270]  Basically, that you could call that a sense of humor of sorts.
[05:52.850 --> 05:56.390]  And no one, I don't think anyone's directly profiting off that financially.
[05:58.890 --> 05:59.990]  And yeah, we'd hope.
[06:00.170 --> 06:00.470]  Good lord.
[06:00.750 --> 06:00.870]  Yes.
[06:02.490 --> 06:06.190]  And also, as we go through this, your definition of evil may vary.
[06:06.230 --> 06:15.630]  If you're a shareware programmer, and you want users to register your product, or something like that, you'll employ evil interface techniques.
[06:15.790 --> 06:20.370]  I'm not assaulting your underlying, you know, a need or necessity to make a profit.
[06:20.370 --> 06:26.230]  But the idea of evil, or adversarial interface design, is when your goals are counter to that of the user.
[06:26.310 --> 06:28.530]  The user wants something for free, you want to live.
[06:29.170 --> 06:31.630]  So, but anyway, so your definition of evil may vary.
[06:33.750 --> 06:42.230]  So, the attacker's problem in this case, and particularly in the context of the web, is that users aren't paying attention to advertisements.
[06:43.270 --> 06:45.470]  And that's at one end of the spectrum.
[06:45.610 --> 06:46.610]  People aren't paying attention.
[06:46.850 --> 06:53.790]  And at the other end of the spectrum, and I've got a link to this article, it's kind of interesting, that Generation MySpace is getting fed up.
[06:53.930 --> 06:58.310]  And it's just representative of people aren't paying attention on one hand.
[06:58.490 --> 07:05.350]  And on the other hand, they will only tolerate so much aggressive interface design before they'll move on to somewhere else.
[07:05.810 --> 07:08.630]  So, they're operating in between those two boundaries.
[07:08.970 --> 07:15.930]  And when I say users aren't paying attention to advertisements, some people in the interface design world have used the term banner ad blindness.
[07:16.290 --> 07:21.790]  That people are becoming desensitized to advertisements.
[07:22.190 --> 07:23.830]  And here's an example.
[07:24.250 --> 07:26.990]  And this comes from useit.com.
[07:27.670 --> 07:29.010]  So, it's a web page.
[07:29.170 --> 07:31.710]  And using eye tracking software, there's a heat map.
[07:31.910 --> 07:35.610]  So, where people are looking at the website, it's hot.
[07:35.790 --> 07:36.270]  It's red.
[07:36.450 --> 07:37.630]  So, that's the content.
[07:37.850 --> 07:42.310]  That's the goal, typically, of users, is they're looking at what they want to look at.
[07:42.790 --> 07:44.970]  And the two advertisements are cool.
[07:45.130 --> 07:45.750]  They're not looking.
[07:45.910 --> 07:47.790]  So, they're not even seeing the advertisements.
[07:48.110 --> 07:53.930]  So, in the context of this problem, what that is forcing people to do, the interface desires to become more and more aggressive.
[07:58.400 --> 07:59.920]  So, this is a broader problem.
[08:00.220 --> 08:02.100]  I mean, has everyone... I mean, I would say that everyone...
[08:02.100 --> 08:03.900]  Who in the room has encountered evil interfaces?
[08:04.380 --> 08:06.160]  And I think pretty much we all have.
[08:08.140 --> 08:09.040]  Who's been...
[08:09.040 --> 08:15.460]  Who's encountered interfaces so annoying that they've just stopped using a particular product, service, or website?
[08:15.940 --> 08:17.120]  And pretty much everybody.
[08:17.300 --> 08:18.860]  You've been driven away to somewhere else.
[08:20.240 --> 08:23.020]  So, and I... What about the countermeasures you employ?
[08:23.180 --> 08:28.060]  I mean, some people use tools like Grease Monkey, which uses snippets of JavaScript to alter pages.
[08:28.300 --> 08:29.360]  Because you can control it.
[08:29.480 --> 08:30.000]  It's in your browser.
[08:30.180 --> 08:31.660]  Grease Monkey allows you to do that.
[08:31.800 --> 08:34.400]  Or there's ad blocking software, pop-up blockers.
[08:35.540 --> 08:36.800]  That's that type of thing.
[08:37.000 --> 08:43.460]  PrivOxy, you know, can do things like change an animated GIF to a non-animated GIF on the fly.
[08:44.440 --> 08:45.800]  How effective are those?
[08:45.920 --> 08:47.980]  I mean, do you think they're really effective?
[08:48.180 --> 08:54.220]  Or how much, like, say... Who thinks they're really solid and you're protected?
[08:55.780 --> 08:56.260]  Okay.
[08:56.380 --> 08:57.360]  Who thinks they're okay?
[08:57.860 --> 09:00.040]  About 50-50, you know, kind of the so-so.
[09:00.940 --> 09:01.420]  Okay.
[09:01.540 --> 09:01.800]  Thanks.
[09:02.640 --> 09:06.480]  Because part of this is getting feedback on what everybody's thinking to see if...
[09:07.160 --> 09:09.580]  just to help define the boundaries of the problem.
[09:09.840 --> 09:11.700]  My take is that this is a hard problem.
[09:11.980 --> 09:24.740]  Because people are very creative and every time it's extremely difficult to computationally or algorithmically dictate boundaries around certain types of content that you can filter from what you're seeing.
[09:25.100 --> 09:36.200]  And I also argue that the more aware you are, the better... particularly for the more subtle attacks, the better defend... the better defensive mechanism you'll have.
[09:36.400 --> 09:38.320]  Although you may get more angry more quickly.
[09:38.440 --> 09:39.060]  That's the downside.
[09:40.600 --> 09:48.240]  So we're covering a little background and just looking at the kind of the threat model and the attacker motivations, which we're in the middle of now.
[09:48.520 --> 09:54.460]  And then this taxonomy of evil usability and then measuring evil is really where we're going with the talk.
[09:56.660 --> 09:59.680]  So the attacker is the designer of the interface.
[10:00.680 --> 10:02.140]  But they don't have to be.
[10:02.260 --> 10:02.640]  Okay.
[10:02.740 --> 10:13.960]  They don't have to be the primary designer because there are certain examples that it's a third party other than the primary content designer that actually... that can influence the interface that's the attacker.
[10:14.200 --> 10:17.600]  So we've seen that and I have a screenshot later in the talk about ISPs.
[10:18.200 --> 10:24.440]  ISPs have... at least are are testing the waters and manipulating data flows that come to your computer.
[10:24.720 --> 10:27.960]  And with that, inserting advertising and the like.
[10:28.560 --> 10:31.300]  And also that people outsource their advertising.
[10:31.500 --> 10:39.320]  So just by the nature of signing up for a given advertising network, it inserts information into a normally agreeable interface.
[10:40.020 --> 10:48.540]  And what you're trying to protect, I believe, are your time, your attention, your money are the primary... primary assets you're trying to protect.
[10:48.840 --> 10:49.900]  But we see this everywhere.
[10:50.040 --> 10:51.080]  It's not just a web thing.
[10:51.640 --> 10:52.920]  It's gas stations.
[10:53.840 --> 10:55.500]  You know, I have some screenshots.
[10:55.680 --> 10:56.640]  We'll cover that in a second.
[10:56.840 --> 11:00.200]  Casinos are all about creating environments that separate you from your money.
[11:00.680 --> 11:02.980]  Grocery stores, software, hardware, the web.
[11:03.060 --> 11:03.840]  It's really everywhere.
[11:04.180 --> 11:10.100]  And okay, on the web, you might be able to influence information flow because it's displayed in your browser and you control that.
[11:10.560 --> 11:12.100]  But other places, you just can't.
[11:12.280 --> 11:14.240]  And it's a hard problem.
[11:15.980 --> 11:25.920]  So like I was saying, when I tried to just start gathering snapshots and examples of this, it just started growing and growing and growing and grew just from a taxonomy to this really encyclopedia.
[11:26.240 --> 11:32.460]  So what I've done right here is tried to cover some of the larger categories and some entertaining examples, I hope.
[11:33.480 --> 11:36.740]  And just show you, get your thoughts on them.
[11:38.520 --> 11:42.800]  But if you look at these, they're all about attacking the human, attacking the end user.
[11:43.040 --> 11:56.920]  So attracting their attention, exploiting their errors, making them work, tricking them, manipulating their navigation either overtly or covertly, and the same thing, manipulating the interface controls.
[11:58.800 --> 12:08.600]  And when you think about attention, there's a spectrum of minimal ways to attract someone's attention, all the way up to very egregious ways of attracting someone's attention.
[12:08.780 --> 12:17.820]  Just using a slightly darker color on top of slightly contrasting color will draw someone's eye, all the way up to... you move up to the blink tag, right?
[12:17.880 --> 12:18.840]  Things blinking at you.
[12:18.960 --> 12:19.620]  It's hard to ignore.
[12:19.800 --> 12:22.840]  And then we've got some really interesting examples in a moment.
[12:24.560 --> 12:31.180]  And what attention attacks really come down to is the... or is closely tied to the idea of pre-attentive processing.
[12:31.420 --> 12:41.300]  And pre-attentive processing is how your brain deals with certain types of input before... without conscious thought.
[12:41.440 --> 12:44.220]  So this happens in like 250 milliseconds or less.
[12:44.820 --> 12:47.200]  Certain things just pop out that you don't have to think about.
[12:47.440 --> 12:51.160]  The red square... or I'm sorry, the red circle in the picture, you just see.
[12:51.420 --> 12:57.000]  The red... the white square amidst the sea of circles, you just see.
[12:57.180 --> 13:03.120]  And those are the type of things that... that allow for effective attention attacks.
[13:03.680 --> 13:06.440]  But it's not limited to... to just those.
[13:06.560 --> 13:08.360]  There's... I have a list there up on the screen.
[13:09.100 --> 13:12.940]  The idea though is you're... before they're even conscious thought because people see these things.
[13:13.100 --> 13:15.660]  We've just been bred to... to deal with it in that way.
[13:16.440 --> 13:19.040]  So just starting at the low end is the use of color.
[13:19.340 --> 13:21.780]  And you have the obvious... obvious things.
[13:21.940 --> 13:24.280]  The low, less... less aggressive side of things.
[13:25.380 --> 13:26.640]  You see, it's interesting.
[13:26.860 --> 13:30.180]  And this is... as you go to different gas stations, take a look at how the pumps are designed.
[13:30.720 --> 13:35.780]  Has anyone ever ordered a car wash without... without actually wanting one?
[13:35.880 --> 13:37.180]  Because you thought you're asking for the receipt?
[13:38.440 --> 13:39.020]  I don't know.
[13:39.200 --> 13:39.880]  I... I don't know.
[13:40.000 --> 13:42.340]  Who's encountered that being asked if they want a car wash?
[13:43.000 --> 13:50.140]  I... I... I... I was once in a gas station and someone came in really, really angry and went up there and said, I ordered a car wash and I don't want a car wash.
[13:50.300 --> 13:53.180]  And the... the gas station attendant was telling me you had to have a car wash.
[13:53.180 --> 13:54.740]  So it was a pretty interesting story.
[13:54.900 --> 13:55.800]  But that... that's part of it.
[13:55.880 --> 13:57.900]  The gas station pumps... a lot of thought goes into...
[13:59.320 --> 13:59.740]  uh...
[13:59.740 --> 14:01.060]  separating you from your money.
[14:01.500 --> 14:04.900]  And the... take a look at how premium is displayed in... in context.
[14:05.340 --> 14:08.680]  The... in context to where you pay and what colors are used.
[14:08.840 --> 14:13.240]  I'd say this one uses regular with red, more likely to draw your attention.
[14:13.240 --> 14:16.060]  So it... I would say it's... it's not particularly evil.
[14:16.220 --> 14:20.520]  Other than any time you have to have a giant sign that tells you where to start, that's a bad sign.
[14:22.480 --> 14:27.040]  Um... you... the... the idea of the... how your eye flows across the page.
[14:27.900 --> 14:33.360]  That... in this example, the content... they put the ad right in line with the content.
[14:33.600 --> 14:38.940]  So you... is... in the... typically in the Western world, people read from left to right and they're trained to do that.
[14:39.080 --> 14:42.700]  So they'll... they'll be forced to read the advertisement probably without even thinking.
[14:44.660 --> 14:46.580]  The idea of crowding out content.
[14:46.880 --> 14:51.840]  And it gets... and I have some great examples later on about how crowding... how to crowd it out content can get.
[14:52.480 --> 14:56.780]  But just in this example, there's your content, and it's bracketed with advertisements.
[14:59.100 --> 14:59.540]  And...
[15:01.000 --> 15:02.900]  Another is the... the video.
[15:03.560 --> 15:05.460]  Uh... audio... the auto playing of video.
[15:05.620 --> 15:09.480]  Sometimes with... uh... with... uh... audio track alongside.
[15:10.600 --> 15:11.820]  And this is Mr. Fisher.
[15:12.040 --> 15:13.740]  And that's the nice thing about talks like this.
[15:13.780 --> 15:14.880]  You can get up there and just...
[15:14.880 --> 15:16.960]  you know, piss people off, I guess.
[15:17.120 --> 15:24.500]  But Mr. Fisher here just immediately starts talking to you about investments when all I wanted to do is read the story about Google developing an iTunes competitor.
[15:25.440 --> 15:26.700]  And that's Mr. Fisher.
[15:28.260 --> 15:31.080]  The idea of... of motion and... and jitter.
[15:31.460 --> 15:34.120]  And it... you know, aside from animation, your... your body...
[15:34.120 --> 15:38.020]  the... the human being has evolved to detect motion.
[15:38.260 --> 15:41.360]  And it's... it's basically extremely difficult to ignore.
[16:02.770 --> 16:05.830]  So... so what we're doing is... the more and more...
[16:05.830 --> 16:14.230]  non-content that's being crowded onto a page, the harder and harder it is to actually try and accomplish with... what your end goal is to read the news story.
[16:14.350 --> 16:16.170]  And there's so much singing and dancing going on.
[16:16.330 --> 16:21.570]  And that percentage, sadly, of content to... non-content is... is declining.
[16:42.330 --> 16:43.950]  So... the hover ad.
[16:44.470 --> 16:47.370]  Those are the things that go flying around on top of your page.
[16:47.630 --> 16:48.790]  Who's... who's encountered those?
[16:49.590 --> 16:50.070]  Yes.
[16:50.190 --> 16:50.790]  Who likes those?
[16:51.750 --> 16:52.230]  Yeah.
[16:53.470 --> 17:00.250]  Uh... in this one, and Slashdot's one of my favorite sites, and out comes a gymnast doing a split right on top of the news story I was trying to read.
[17:00.390 --> 17:02.210]  Bouncing up and down for quite a while.
[17:03.750 --> 17:11.030]  In another... it was... I was trying to get the weather from a news site, and out comes a person come walking into the middle of my screen.
[17:11.130 --> 17:14.990]  The person's about this big on my screen trying to sell me a Toyota Highlander.
[17:15.690 --> 17:16.430]  Talking to me.
[17:16.670 --> 17:18.310]  And it's... it's incredibly annoying.
[17:18.430 --> 17:20.790]  But again, this is moving up that spectrum of evil.
[17:26.490 --> 17:30.450]  And it's not just isolated to single animations on a page.
[17:30.770 --> 17:32.230]  Sometimes they'll have more and more.
[17:32.330 --> 17:34.030]  And this is from the Weather Channel.
[17:34.190 --> 17:36.470]  And all I wanted to do was watch the weather.
[17:36.590 --> 17:38.550]  And I had this... this person dancing at the beginning.
[17:38.890 --> 17:40.590]  So all I want to do is look at the weather.
[17:41.350 --> 17:46.910]  But when you go to a page and you see two dancing people on it, it is very hard just to quickly look at the weather.
[17:49.230 --> 17:57.770]  But then... and... and I think part of this is over time is... is people... if you visit this site a lot, I have a person... a friend who checks the weather a lot for whatever reason.
[17:58.590 --> 18:01.930]  And he tells me he doesn't even really see these dancing... dancing women anymore.
[18:02.210 --> 18:03.370]  At first they really annoyed him.
[18:03.570 --> 18:04.850]  Now he knows where to look.
[18:10.940 --> 18:18.280]  So, outside of hover advertisements, this is one of the most egregious rectangular type advertisements I've seen.
[18:18.440 --> 18:19.900]  The fixed position advertisements.
[18:20.660 --> 18:23.860]  It's from... from NetSuite.
[18:24.040 --> 18:26.420]  And you can see it's a pretty large size in relation to the content.
[18:26.600 --> 18:32.740]  Because if you think of the above the fold, what's actually presented in the browser, this about equals the content you're trying to view.
[18:32.960 --> 18:36.980]  Tell me if you can... if you could read the story while this is going on.
[18:51.350 --> 18:51.850]  Anyone?
[19:09.540 --> 19:15.830]  So, the inverse of attracting attention is sometimes the interface designer wants to avoid attention for a variety of reasons.
[19:17.270 --> 19:24.490]  So, one approach, this is the Google approach, is to make the advertisements arguably subtle.
[19:24.730 --> 19:27.400]  I mean, compared to the spinning head, this is... this is subtle.
[19:29.880 --> 19:31.790]  Less they anger users too much.
[19:32.070 --> 19:36.100]  And what's interesting about the web these days is people... sites like Google can run experiments.
[19:36.400 --> 19:47.400]  They can try websites and optimize, you know, say... with the... they could test different types of techniques, see which one's more effective, and have a survival of the fittest approach.
[19:47.400 --> 19:50.030]  So that... and I'm told that they do do that.
[19:52.120 --> 19:57.550]  Another approach is when you don't want people to see something, but you have to have it there for legal reasons.
[19:58.750 --> 20:03.400]  For example, the privacy policy of tax cut.
[20:03.700 --> 20:10.250]  They have a button off to the side when people are going to gravitate toward the... the next button, which is set by default.
[20:11.600 --> 20:13.990]  Another is the ever... ever popular EULA.
[20:16.300 --> 20:26.380]  And if you look, this tiny textural window, the little tiny window opens up to 10 full textural pages of... of content of... of their EULA.
[20:28.100 --> 20:33.680]  So, we've had this kind of spectrum of attracting attention and the opposite of avoiding attention.
[20:33.680 --> 20:35.970]  Now, this is where you just force yourself.
[20:36.140 --> 20:36.750]  It's impossible.
[20:36.990 --> 20:39.200]  I know the spinning head is pretty much impossible to ignore.
[20:39.400 --> 20:43.120]  So, these actually stop flow until you... until you interact.
[20:44.420 --> 20:48.970]  So, you've all encountered... who's encountered annoying random updates from their software?
[20:50.440 --> 20:50.960]  Right?
[20:51.210 --> 20:54.180]  Again, it's getting your attention and it sits there on your desktop.
[20:54.380 --> 21:00.600]  And I'm not talking about my favorite Microsoft asking if you want... you have unused icons on your desktop.
[21:01.070 --> 21:02.310]  I'm not talking about that.
[21:02.470 --> 21:06.750]  They... I don't think they're doing that to try and sell you something or... or push some product.
[21:06.900 --> 21:07.680]  They're trying to be helpful.
[21:08.140 --> 21:14.920]  But... but many software packages, I believe, are just... informing you of updates often to just get your attention.
[21:15.120 --> 21:15.920]  Think about their product.
[21:16.070 --> 21:16.750]  Maybe you'll upgrade.
[21:20.600 --> 21:22.010]  Oftentimes, you'll see it on websites.
[21:23.160 --> 21:24.860]  Here's just an example of taking a survey.
[21:25.990 --> 21:26.660]  Network World.
[21:26.880 --> 21:28.010]  They show you the content.
[21:28.160 --> 21:29.770]  They tease you with the content you're trying to get.
[21:29.770 --> 21:33.570]  But in the background, they value my opinion and want me to take a survey.
[21:35.160 --> 21:38.120]  And the ever popular interstitial advertisement.
[21:38.360 --> 21:39.070]  The splash screen.
[21:39.880 --> 21:41.600]  This one at least gives you controls.
[21:42.400 --> 21:45.310]  And a time... you know, tells you a certain period of time and gives you control of the exit.
[21:45.460 --> 21:47.230]  But you're spending time trying to find that.
[21:47.510 --> 21:48.250]  Some do not.
[21:50.930 --> 21:52.100]  The FBI warning.
[21:52.810 --> 21:54.440]  Oftentimes, you can't skip over this.
[21:55.220 --> 21:58.420]  Unless... well, people have found ways by ripping it off the CD altogether.
[21:59.380 --> 22:04.480]  And there's some interesting variants and parodies of this, by the way, out on the web, if you're looking to be entertained.
[22:06.180 --> 22:08.260]  And I think this is another interesting attack.
[22:08.500 --> 22:10.260]  The idea of exploiting errors.
[22:14.960 --> 22:17.320]  So, we make mistakes.
[22:17.560 --> 22:21.320]  Good interfaces are supposed to help us avoid errors or easily recover from errors.
[22:21.700 --> 22:27.820]  What people do, evil interface designers, they find out what mistakes are likely and then use that to their advantage.
[22:29.360 --> 22:31.140]  So, here's an example from Yahoo!
[22:31.340 --> 22:31.640]  Movies.
[22:31.900 --> 22:36.280]  What would you like to have happen when you type in... mistype a movie name?
[22:36.280 --> 22:39.240]  Would you like to see a list of movies with a similar name?
[22:39.500 --> 22:43.540]  Or would you like to stare at a spiked animated blowfish expanding and contracting?
[22:44.180 --> 22:45.700]  Well, I'll tell you that Yahoo!
[22:45.960 --> 22:48.480]  made the decision to go with the spiked animated blowfish.
[22:50.240 --> 22:51.640]  And it is... it's animated.
[22:54.360 --> 23:00.240]  In contrast, though, to, say, a Google approach in this example, I was searching for Gattaca.
[23:00.340 --> 23:01.060]  I spelled it wrong.
[23:01.060 --> 23:07.340]  And it immediately brought me... one told me the correct spelling and by... it was able to find the right link regardless.
[23:11.700 --> 23:14.720]  Another is the idea of exploiting capture errors.
[23:15.540 --> 23:20.280]  So, for people of you who are into usability, it's interesting to go to just known error types.
[23:20.480 --> 23:23.840]  There's lists and usability texts of types of errors.
[23:25.040 --> 23:27.700]  One that I found interesting was the idea of a capture error.
[23:27.880 --> 23:35.580]  So, it's a type of error where you have this more practice behavior that takes... kind of overrides what you... this less familiar behavior you need.
[23:35.740 --> 23:38.620]  So, I just wanted to look up a word on dictionary.com.
[23:39.240 --> 23:42.280]  And what pops up is that.
[23:42.520 --> 23:46.460]  Right where on the left hand side of the screen, red button, blinking cursor.
[23:47.280 --> 23:50.460]  And to me, that's... you type in the word you want to look up.
[23:50.560 --> 23:52.540]  Well, that's actually an ad for the visual thesaurus.
[23:53.080 --> 23:55.920]  And you have to go up here and go with search.
[23:55.920 --> 23:58.040]  So, I'd wonder how many people make that mistake.
[24:00.900 --> 24:03.100]  Another is the mistyped URL.
[24:03.360 --> 24:07.580]  And this gets back to other people who can control your interface.
[24:07.960 --> 24:17.720]  So, if you mistype a URL... I don't particularly want Roadrunner giving me... well, one... I just did this arbitrarily.
[24:18.740 --> 24:22.880]  I don't... I was searching for the... or typed in the last hope.
[24:23.500 --> 24:24.200]  Misspelled it.
[24:24.560 --> 24:25.880]  And they kindly caught it.
[24:26.360 --> 24:32.180]  And gave me a list of some sponsored advertisements for my... for my mistake.
[24:35.130 --> 24:38.110]  Also, the idea of sometimes you click on a page to give it focus.
[24:38.750 --> 24:47.690]  And rather than just making the hyperlinks here, the advertisements, or even this red bounded region, people expand it into larger white space hotspots.
[24:47.830 --> 24:49.410]  Trying to catch misplaced clicks.
[24:51.270 --> 24:52.110]  Another technique?
[24:52.390 --> 24:53.570]  Making the user work.
[24:56.590 --> 24:59.670]  Usually... well, in these examples, there's some goal.
[24:59.850 --> 25:02.130]  Some... the designer's trying to push you in some direction.
[25:02.330 --> 25:03.930]  Usually getting a premium account.
[25:04.050 --> 25:04.810]  Paying for it.
[25:05.050 --> 25:07.490]  Otherwise, they're going to make you pay and in another way.
[25:08.410 --> 25:09.710]  Here, you have to wait.
[25:10.970 --> 25:16.730]  Your download ticket is reserved and you have to wait .2 minutes before the download will be ready.
[25:16.990 --> 25:18.890]  Unless you want to sign up for a premium account.
[25:20.310 --> 25:22.350]  They even tell you how much premium accounts are.
[25:25.010 --> 25:28.170]  This one, if you're not a premium user, they make you complete a captcha.
[25:29.750 --> 25:37.570]  And this is pretty much one of the hard... captchas are... basically designed to make people work, determine humans are humans and not computers.
[25:38.650 --> 25:40.630]  This one, you have to tell cats from dogs.
[25:40.930 --> 25:47.910]  So quickly, who can tell me the three... the four letters that have the dog... I'm sorry, the cat.
[25:48.030 --> 25:49.090]  The four letters that have the cat.
[26:02.510 --> 26:10.570]  So, as best I can tell, it's the... it's 3TGW... 3TGW.
[26:10.570 --> 26:11.670]  But that's work.
[26:11.810 --> 26:13.230]  That's a pain in the ass, actually.
[26:13.450 --> 26:19.150]  And you do that enough to people, they're not going to... they may... they may consider getting a premium account.
[26:21.050 --> 26:23.670]  Another is the time-honored leave trash around.
[26:23.870 --> 26:25.810]  And this kind of relates back to doing work.
[26:26.090 --> 26:30.650]  This is just a tiny example of some of the egregious things we've all encountered in the past.
[26:30.890 --> 26:35.190]  I did an iTunes update and I didn't want to update QuickTime.
[26:35.370 --> 26:36.310]  Well, it did anyway.
[26:36.530 --> 26:37.050]  And not did it...
[26:37.050 --> 26:40.610]  not only did it do it, it put a piece of trash on my desktop.
[26:41.070 --> 26:48.530]  If you've opened Wired magazine, or any... any magazine, but Wired tends to have a lot of blown-in subscription cards and they fall over the floor.
[26:48.890 --> 26:52.430]  That's getting... getting users' attention and leaving trash around.
[26:52.650 --> 26:58.210]  You probably have seen it in different software packages that install extra things or operating systems.
[26:58.410 --> 26:58.870]  Some were...
[26:58.870 --> 26:59.930]  I remember Windows 98.
[27:00.050 --> 27:00.450]  Holy crap.
[27:00.570 --> 27:03.710]  There's just stuff everywhere and you have to spend days trying to disentangle it.
[27:06.170 --> 27:11.090]  And if you go to interface design literature, they tell you, set intelligent defaults.
[27:11.110 --> 27:12.750]  Figure out what the users are going to want to do.
[27:13.330 --> 27:18.690]  In this one, I'm not sure, you know, what their intent was, but I think it's... it illustrates the problem.
[27:19.950 --> 27:20.970]  That... have you all seen it?
[27:20.990 --> 27:22.850]  When you go to sign up, like, it automatically checks.
[27:22.950 --> 27:28.610]  Yes, I'd like to sign up for your mailing list to provide... provide me more information about your products and services.
[27:29.610 --> 27:33.190]  But the idea here is setting unintelligent defaults is a common technique.
[27:33.430 --> 27:38.330]  In this one, I just wanted... want to deal with RAR files with this software.
[27:38.830 --> 27:42.130]  There's a select all button, and this goes down to another technique.
[27:42.270 --> 27:46.390]  They just don't provide functionality that you might want in that adversarial relationship.
[27:46.630 --> 27:48.110]  There's no unselect all button.
[27:48.410 --> 27:54.210]  So you have to... you have to mainly uncheck each one, and they make it hard, make it work.
[27:56.210 --> 27:56.670]  Deception.
[27:58.290 --> 28:01.090]  You've all... has everyone encountered fake hyperlinks?
[28:02.190 --> 28:06.450]  Okay, this one at least they chose to use green, so you know something is odd about them.
[28:09.030 --> 28:11.170]  Fake forms, another popular technique.
[28:14.290 --> 28:20.010]  And this one is on a bank rate website, and it actually looks like pretty... it's bank rate select.
[28:20.230 --> 28:24.750]  It looks like the form you're supposed to fill in to get some information, but it's actually a banner ad.
[28:27.110 --> 28:28.090]  The bait and switch.
[28:28.310 --> 28:32.350]  When you see a thumbnail on a web page and you click on it, what are you... what's supposed to happen?
[28:33.750 --> 28:35.610]  You should see a large picture.
[28:36.010 --> 28:37.610]  Well, that... here's the thumbnail.
[28:38.130 --> 28:40.070]  It actually takes you to your register page.
[28:40.210 --> 28:43.350]  So that's another common... not getting on Google, but just it's a common technique.
[28:43.350 --> 28:44.530]  There's some piece of content.
[28:45.010 --> 28:49.690]  They put a little snippet of it out there in front of you, and then say, oh, oh, bait and switch.
[28:50.150 --> 28:51.330]  Here, register for our service.
[28:54.090 --> 28:55.550]  Anyone use Experts Exchange?
[28:57.510 --> 28:57.930]  Yeah.
[28:58.570 --> 28:59.390]  I used to.
[29:00.130 --> 29:01.310]  And you'd search.
[29:01.450 --> 29:02.130]  It was the first hit.
[29:02.250 --> 29:03.610]  Many programming problems.
[29:03.630 --> 29:05.430]  You could find great solutions to it.
[29:05.770 --> 29:14.390]  Well, now... and they've decided not only to make it a service you have to pay for, but now they have the the problem and pseudo solutions underneath.
[29:14.790 --> 29:18.330]  So the answers... the responses look just like you see up there.
[29:18.490 --> 29:19.950]  But if you actually read it...
[29:23.010 --> 29:24.150]  it's not the solution.
[29:24.470 --> 29:27.950]  So this is just some random point in time they change from one model to the other.
[29:27.950 --> 29:28.210]  Yes?
[29:30.970 --> 29:31.290]  Really?
[29:31.430 --> 29:32.230]  Beyond all of these?
[29:34.290 --> 29:35.590]  Ah, well, good to know.
[29:35.690 --> 29:36.730]  I never got that far.
[29:36.990 --> 29:37.310]  Okay?
[29:40.170 --> 29:45.670]  And I noticed that their rankings in Google and the like are dropping and other sites are coming up.
[29:45.830 --> 29:46.550]  That's good to know, though.
[29:46.650 --> 29:48.010]  Well, of course, they don't want you to know that.
[29:48.150 --> 29:51.780]  They want you to know what you're getting at.
[29:52.200 --> 29:53.880]  They don't want you to know the answers you have.
[29:54.100 --> 29:55.000]  They want you to pay for it.
[29:55.060 --> 29:57.580]  Yeah, because once it gets out, then people will bypass it.
[29:58.100 --> 30:02.000]  And they might have done that just for search engine, you know, like optimization techniques or something.
[30:02.120 --> 30:03.560]  The content may need to be there.
[30:06.140 --> 30:08.520]  Anyone encounter spoofed YouTube videos?
[30:09.000 --> 30:14.060]  It looks... it's an image and it's set up to look like a YouTube video, but it's supposed to be content, but it's not.
[30:16.100 --> 30:17.760]  So this is just an example.
[30:22.040 --> 30:24.560]  And this is kind of on the fringe.
[30:24.720 --> 30:33.100]  I think there's an evil interface design technique of being friendly, where you say you want to collect snippets of personal information on people.
[30:34.820 --> 30:39.260]  Or in return for... like micropayments of personal information in return for some service.
[30:39.900 --> 30:43.540]  And I think that you can be friendly and kind of go to the other end.
[30:43.680 --> 30:46.200]  I'm not saying Google does that, but I think Google does that.
[30:46.600 --> 30:48.940]  And that's just another approach.
[30:50.780 --> 30:53.800]  Other approaches... manipulate, steer the user where you want them to go.
[30:53.800 --> 30:59.960]  So on this one... and this is also the pseudo hyperlinks, the example I used earlier.
[31:00.220 --> 31:02.880]  But you can force... you can steer a user around the page.
[31:03.100 --> 31:07.120]  Once I saw these three links, I found myself driving a certain way.
[31:07.300 --> 31:15.540]  And I wouldn't be surprised if this evolved into steering you in some particular direction, maybe toward another advertisement, like a dead-end canyon or something like that.
[31:15.620 --> 31:16.980]  You're sending people a certain way.
[31:17.160 --> 31:19.940]  But you can force people how they navigate around the interface.
[31:21.620 --> 31:24.440]  And this just has a... I call it a rollover minefield.
[31:24.540 --> 31:26.180]  If you touch it, you're explosion.
[31:27.580 --> 31:30.360]  I've also seen a rollover minefield with check boxes.
[31:30.660 --> 31:35.280]  So the creativity here, it's like every possible combination, every possible variant, people are exploring.
[31:39.030 --> 31:41.830]  You can bury your landmines in the rollover minefield.
[31:41.950 --> 31:43.750]  So here, I'd never seen this.
[31:44.230 --> 31:45.150]  It's just a word.
[31:45.270 --> 31:46.570]  It's just the word Florida.
[31:46.810 --> 31:49.430]  It looks like the word Florida until you go near it.
[31:49.570 --> 31:51.570]  And then it turns into a pop-up advertisement.
[31:55.770 --> 31:58.010]  And as we look to the future, virtual worlds.
[31:58.530 --> 31:58.670]  Okay?
[31:58.990 --> 32:01.010]  Evil interfaces are there as well.
[32:01.150 --> 32:10.130]  Here, you can purchase a big placard in front of the United States Capitol building that blocks the user until they view the... until they view the advertisement.
[32:10.330 --> 32:12.410]  It's for sale right now, if anyone wants to purchase it.
[32:15.580 --> 32:17.600]  Another technique is to have the hidden goal.
[32:17.800 --> 32:20.500]  So you want the free version of a given software package.
[32:21.040 --> 32:24.060]  And sites, there's a kind of ebb and flow as people hide these things.
[32:24.200 --> 32:26.560]  But there's this trail where they have all the paid versions.
[32:26.780 --> 32:29.060]  And then 15-day trial versions.
[32:29.240 --> 32:32.360]  And eventually, you can find the free version that you want.
[32:32.820 --> 32:35.440]  And I've encountered that with Winamp, with Zone Alarm, and others.
[32:36.840 --> 32:37.880]  And that's the content.
[32:38.000 --> 32:38.640]  That's what I'm looking for.
[32:38.720 --> 32:39.900]  It took a while to find the page.
[32:40.040 --> 32:40.660]  Not too bad.
[32:40.760 --> 32:41.320]  But it's better.
[32:41.440 --> 32:42.460]  It used to be horrendous.
[32:44.320 --> 32:48.860]  And it's surrounded, though, with other things that they want you to do more.
[32:49.040 --> 32:54.160]  Like take the 15-day trial, which is going to expire, which would probably encourage you to purchase their product.
[32:55.760 --> 32:56.920]  The dead-end trail.
[32:57.380 --> 32:59.940]  So there's some behavior you don't want the user taking.
[33:00.080 --> 33:02.380]  But you need to give them some semblance of functionality.
[33:02.840 --> 33:05.720]  Here I was trying to change my default browser to Firefox.
[33:06.160 --> 33:08.760]  And there's... for HTM files.
[33:09.040 --> 33:11.940]  And what it does is it throws you, okay, you want to change it?
[33:12.000 --> 33:12.220]  Fine.
[33:12.400 --> 33:13.020]  Go find it.
[33:17.260 --> 33:19.700]  And then also the near-infinite trail.
[33:20.020 --> 33:23.720]  Has anyone actually tried to get that free laptop or iPod that they've won?
[33:24.480 --> 33:25.660]  Has anyone ever tried?
[33:26.360 --> 33:26.800]  Yes?
[33:28.200 --> 33:28.640]  Yeah.
[33:28.920 --> 33:36.480]  Well, I know one technique employed by those people is I think some people actually have a laptop or an iPod that it may actually give to someone.
[33:36.560 --> 33:40.380]  But they have a near-infinite trail of questions and forms to fill in.
[33:40.440 --> 33:44.020]  So I know one person spent hours trying to get it and just went on forever.
[33:44.700 --> 33:45.140]  Yes?
[33:45.280 --> 33:49.410]  I just... I knew of curiosity.
[33:49.590 --> 33:51.930]  I just wanted to see how far the rabbit hole went.
[33:54.910 --> 33:57.270]  So was it a near-infinite rabbit hole?
[33:57.390 --> 33:58.730]  Oh, it wasn't.
[33:58.830 --> 34:00.630]  I mean, at some point I just gave up.
[34:06.070 --> 34:08.110]  It would be interesting to have like a tag team effort.
[34:08.310 --> 34:11.370]  You know, you say, we're going to make you give us that iPod.
[34:13.210 --> 34:14.910]  One of us can't, but all of us can.
[34:18.560 --> 34:25.980]  So another technique, I was going through the interface design books and it says make shortcuts to help users accomplish their tasks quicker.
[34:26.200 --> 34:32.380]  So my task was avoiding advertisements in the PC world news story and not having to go through eight pages to do so.
[34:32.920 --> 34:35.680]  So what they did is they broke my shortcut two ways.
[34:36.340 --> 34:39.020]  One, they embedded an advertisement in there.
[34:39.140 --> 34:39.520]  Okay.
[34:40.000 --> 34:45.500]  But they gave me a pop-up that I had to respond to blocking my way.
[34:46.060 --> 34:49.040]  So that's another technique people use is break shortcuts.
[34:50.380 --> 34:51.320]  Manipulating controls.
[34:52.080 --> 35:00.840]  So I thought, as I was trying to think broadly about this problem, you think there are many places that interfaces where people try and influence it.
[35:00.900 --> 35:06.720]  This one, just the idea of, you know, the genius of, how many keyboards on this planet now have a Windows logo on them?
[35:11.350 --> 35:14.410]  Well, obviously you've encountered disabling controls for the people.
[35:14.650 --> 35:23.230]  I've never, I have a something beyond a TiVo these days, but TiVo had the 30-second skip and I'm told that went away because people didn't like you having that functionality.
[35:23.670 --> 35:29.610]  But you've seen disabled back buttons, right clicks, fast-forwards, all can be disabled.
[35:31.930 --> 35:33.250]  Just more creativity.
[35:33.730 --> 35:36.610]  You go to, I've never seen menus with advertisements before.
[35:37.230 --> 35:39.470]  So pull down menu here.
[35:39.770 --> 35:42.330]  And on the left, there's the, what I'm looking for.
[35:42.410 --> 35:45.590]  But on the right, they decided to put a giant advertisement on the pull down menu.
[35:47.970 --> 35:50.470]  And just a couple of, you know, different examples.
[35:50.990 --> 35:52.950]  So there's the time-honored threat in the user.
[35:56.030 --> 35:59.910]  And actually, these, often many techniques are employed.
[36:00.050 --> 36:01.730]  Threaten the user, waste their time.
[36:02.830 --> 36:03.990]  That, that leave trash around.
[36:04.090 --> 36:04.350]  There are many.
[36:04.650 --> 36:06.690]  It doesn't have to be just one technique at a time.
[36:06.790 --> 36:07.690]  They operate in parallel.
[36:09.570 --> 36:10.350]  Confusing the user.
[36:10.530 --> 36:17.550]  And if you recall back to the browser wars, you know, they, they asked you, this is, Internet Explorer is not your default browser.
[36:17.670 --> 36:18.570]  Would you like to change it?
[36:18.690 --> 36:21.450]  And, you know, what do your parents do or grandparents do when they see that?
[36:21.510 --> 36:22.970]  They think their computer's going to explode.
[36:23.610 --> 36:27.670]  So the, just the confusing the user with, with, is another technique.
[36:28.750 --> 36:30.410]  And this was the example I promised.
[36:30.550 --> 36:38.530]  The idea of that, be, other people who can influence your flow of information can, can get into the interface.
[36:38.890 --> 36:43.450]  So in this one, a, this is from Roger, Rogers Internet in Canada.
[36:43.570 --> 36:46.150]  And this came from a Lauren Weinstein's website.
[36:46.830 --> 36:48.410]  That was a very good example.
[36:48.670 --> 36:56.310]  They took the, the, someone's Google search, or Google request to go to the page, and insert their advertisement at the top.
[36:56.530 --> 37:01.250]  And if people, and they have the power to do that, and they can just swap out advertisements on the fly.
[37:01.610 --> 37:03.870]  Dan Kaminsky called this the Times Square effect.
[37:04.070 --> 37:08.930]  Where in movies, Times Square advertisements are swapped out with someone else's advertisements.
[37:10.090 --> 37:11.290]  But something to think about.
[37:11.410 --> 37:13.690]  Anyone who can control the interface, even in subtle ways.
[37:17.910 --> 37:18.390]  All right.
[37:18.610 --> 37:22.430]  So kind of taking, take, try to draw a line around the problem.
[37:22.630 --> 37:23.790]  And then look at examples.
[37:23.970 --> 37:25.390]  And it's, like I said, it's growing.
[37:25.530 --> 37:26.870]  The more you look, the more you see.
[37:27.150 --> 37:35.030]  But trying to bring this back in, I think it's useful to think about how do you measure evil on, on a webpage, or on an interface in general.
[37:36.030 --> 37:40.270]  So one technique I, I looked at was just signal to noise ratio.
[37:40.850 --> 37:44.250]  And what, what really got me thinking on this is I went to Fox News.
[37:44.610 --> 37:51.790]  And it seemed like everything was, were giant heads of people, spinning things, blinking things, and a little tiny news story wrapped, wrapped down in the middle.
[37:52.630 --> 37:54.830]  And, and this, this is computer world.
[37:55.350 --> 37:56.390]  That's the content.
[37:56.890 --> 37:57.370]  Okay.
[37:58.370 --> 38:01.650]  And if I should, I probably should have another slide just blacks out everything else.
[38:03.130 --> 38:05.530]  And so I just did a raw pixel count.
[38:05.650 --> 38:13.930]  And if you just do a number of pixels to the, the total number of pixels, pixels of content to the pixels on the page, you've got 15 percent content.
[38:14.490 --> 38:15.290]  Not, not good.
[38:15.530 --> 38:17.370]  Another, another approach, 15 percent.
[38:17.590 --> 38:19.870]  I mean, the interface is probably supposed to be 100 percent content.
[38:20.730 --> 38:22.330]  But you, you've got 15 percent.
[38:22.470 --> 38:23.430]  And that's some extreme.
[38:23.570 --> 38:25.130]  I mean, there's some navigation items and things.
[38:25.250 --> 38:26.710]  But the core content, the news story.
[38:27.670 --> 38:29.930]  Another approach I used was just signal to noise.
[38:30.090 --> 38:34.550]  So if you take the ratio of signal, the content, to the noise, it's a .18.
[38:35.070 --> 38:36.470]  Again, not, not good.
[38:38.930 --> 38:42.230]  But signal to noise, it's not a, it's just not a linear relationship.
[38:42.490 --> 38:43.570]  Signal to noise isn't enough.
[38:43.970 --> 38:48.330]  Because if you put a spinning head on a page, for example, it might take up a small amount of pixels.
[38:48.490 --> 38:51.610]  But it's interruption, it's, it's disturbance is significant.
[38:53.390 --> 38:57.390]  And just, just this example here of the, the two dancing ladies, which we saw earlier.
[38:59.590 --> 39:02.750]  Now, some people can get away with lots of evil.
[39:02.870 --> 39:04.770]  Some people can get away with a little bit of evil.
[39:05.010 --> 39:07.430]  It depends on the value of what the user is seeking.
[39:07.750 --> 39:13.570]  Some people will crawl through, I remember reading a quote, some people will crawl through sewers to get free porn.
[39:13.710 --> 39:15.690]  I thought something like that was a quote along those lines.
[39:16.270 --> 39:18.250]  And there's some, probably some truth in there.
[39:18.310 --> 39:19.950]  People will tolerate more based on the value.
[39:20.950 --> 39:24.870]  So if you consider this axis of evil, that wasn't, I didn't mean to say that.
[39:25.530 --> 39:37.490]  If you consider this axis of evil, some point, there's a, and, you know, contrasted against the value of what the user is trying to accomplish.
[39:38.870 --> 39:46.250]  So if evil is far less than the value, if they only have to deal with a little bit of evil and they get something they value far more, then they're satisfied.
[39:47.250 --> 39:50.450]  And it just approaches that threshold, they tolerate it.
[39:50.590 --> 39:53.510]  They're not happy, they may complain a little bit, but they'll still do it.
[39:53.510 --> 40:01.470]  And then there's this threshold where they cross, they cross the threshold and then they start becoming annoyed and then angry.
[40:01.650 --> 40:04.510]  And when they become angry, well, angry, they go somewhere else.
[40:04.610 --> 40:05.410]  They're going to blog about it.
[40:05.490 --> 40:07.570]  They're going to send, tell their friends not to go there.
[40:08.810 --> 40:09.970]  And we've all been there.
[40:10.110 --> 40:19.810]  So there's, I think, advertisers, kind of like airlines, they give you just enough space so you don't go, an average-sized person won't go insane on that duration flight.
[40:20.130 --> 40:22.790]  I think that's what they're doing with advertisements.
[40:23.110 --> 40:27.730]  How, How much evil, based on the value, will the average-sized citizen deal with?
[40:29.250 --> 40:30.690]  But value is relative.
[40:31.110 --> 40:32.710]  Every one of us values things differently.
[40:32.950 --> 40:37.190]  Some people might even want to see advertisements of a certain sort.
[40:39.730 --> 40:44.790]  So down at one end, say, search and news sites, people may tolerate far less evil.
[40:44.930 --> 40:45.910]  So there's this threshold.
[40:46.330 --> 40:49.910]  And other people may value, say, porn, very highly.
[40:50.150 --> 40:52.070]  So they'll tolerate a lot more evil.
[40:52.170 --> 40:56.270]  And website designers... and I'm just throwing out two arbitrary examples.
[40:57.390 --> 41:01.730]  But website designers will try to find that sweet spot.
[41:01.850 --> 41:04.070]  How much evil will people tolerate before they go somewhere else?
[41:05.510 --> 41:09.410]  So here's some related papers I think you might find interesting.
[41:09.670 --> 41:15.990]  I'll have them up on my website, rumint.org, R-U-M-I-N-T, stands for Rumor Intelligence.
[41:17.510 --> 41:22.530]  And I'll have that up there shortly so you can get the slides.
[41:24.870 --> 41:26.490]  So I'm going to be around the con.
[41:26.690 --> 41:28.630]  If you see me, I'd love to chat with you about this.
[41:28.710 --> 41:30.350]  And we have some time for Q&A.
[41:31.810 --> 41:35.030]  I know where people learn good interface design techniques.
[41:35.250 --> 41:39.350]  I'd be really interested in your thoughts on, where do people learn evil interface design techniques?
[41:39.610 --> 41:44.250]  Do they learn them just taking their existing work and going further?
[41:45.210 --> 41:47.270]  Kind of examples out there and just extending it?
[41:48.850 --> 41:50.930]  And then ideas where to go from here.
[41:51.290 --> 41:53.310]  Because I don't think we're a perfect solution.
[41:54.730 --> 42:01.590]  So before we go into Q&As, I just want to point out, I'm trying to put numbers to those charts.
[42:01.770 --> 42:03.930]  So not just have this axis of evil with no numbers.
[42:04.370 --> 42:06.190]  So my friend here has a survey.
[42:06.450 --> 42:08.650]  If any of you would want to fill it out, there's no names.
[42:08.970 --> 42:10.910]  It's circle things, one page.
[42:11.150 --> 42:14.550]  If on the way out you wanted to grab one, I'd be entirely indebted to you.
[42:15.530 --> 42:18.890]  Because I'm trying to put numbers and kind of continue forward with this and that would help.
[42:20.290 --> 42:21.890]  So just to wrap up.
[42:22.810 --> 42:25.490]  Well first, who knew Microsoft had children's books?
[42:26.730 --> 42:27.170]  Okay.
[42:27.450 --> 42:29.390]  So Microsoft does indeed have a children's book.
[42:29.810 --> 42:32.310]  And this is trying... it's tongue-in-cheek.
[42:32.490 --> 42:37.290]  But it's trying to sell... or tell children that it's okay to have a Microsoft home server.
[42:37.830 --> 42:39.670]  And other friends... your friends may be jealous.
[42:39.970 --> 42:40.790]  And it's okay.
[42:40.890 --> 42:41.690]  You can deal with that.
[42:41.890 --> 42:45.450]  So I added it and said, do you think interfaces are great?
[42:45.630 --> 42:46.630]  Of course you do.
[42:47.310 --> 42:48.470]  But there's an ominous but.
[42:48.730 --> 42:49.930]  Interfaces aren't always great.
[42:50.150 --> 42:51.830]  So with that, I thank you for your time.
[42:52.010 --> 42:52.750]  What are your questions?
[43:02.340 --> 43:02.780]  Sir?
[43:03.420 --> 43:06.440]  I'm turning a question back on you.
[43:06.660 --> 43:08.620]  But where do... Oh, excuse me.
[43:08.780 --> 43:17.260]  I want to turn your first question back on you and ask you, where do people learn about how to build these people adversarial interfaces?
[43:17.640 --> 43:21.640]  Is there any... obviously some things are codified but in an informal way.
[43:22.100 --> 43:29.380]  I would think the marketing, the advertising community, some of these are just evolutions from the advertising community.
[43:29.560 --> 43:31.060]  I think a lot of it's ad hoc.
[43:31.280 --> 43:32.480]  People just have that mindset.
[43:32.520 --> 43:38.240]  They can go in, and look at what people have done, kind of get the idea, and then get creative with it.
[43:38.460 --> 43:44.120]  So I don't know if there's like a book out there that's the Encyclopedia of Evil Usability or a secret website or anything.
[43:45.680 --> 43:49.380]  So I would say the advertising world kind of studies how to manipulate people.
[43:50.020 --> 43:52.860]  And that a lot of it, I think, is just ad hoc.
[43:53.180 --> 43:53.820]  That's my take.
[43:54.880 --> 44:01.620]  One other thing that sort of reminds me of is Dana Boyd's work that she's been doing on Facebook and MySpace and who's using them.
[44:02.000 --> 44:12.280]  And the reason that comes to mind for me is, I mean, I don't know if anybody else here has ever tried to dig out, you know, pop-up adult, you know, spyware adult computer.
[44:12.440 --> 44:19.260]  I did it for a kid in the South Bronx who had no family who were able to help her, you know, get this stuff off and didn't even know.
[44:19.360 --> 44:28.160]  I mean, like, when I started having her read computers, she would start at the top left-hand corner of the screen and read me absolutely everything that was on the screen when I said, read me what's in the window now.
[44:28.600 --> 44:31.720]  So, I mean, it seems to me that there's sort of a class divide here.
[44:31.880 --> 44:39.680]  And it ends up that, you know, people with fewer resources to begin with are the people who are exposed to this more and don't have the means to get rid of it.
[44:39.740 --> 44:43.680]  So my question is sort of, how do we, I mean, do we rectify that?
[44:43.700 --> 44:46.800]  And I know there's plenty of libertarians who are like, f*ck it, the market will sort it out.
[44:46.880 --> 44:48.680]  But I think the market's just going to make it worse.
[44:49.140 --> 44:50.800]  Well, I think the market is making it worse.
[44:50.900 --> 44:52.240]  They're pushing as far as they can.
[44:52.240 --> 44:54.920]  I think we're getting desensitized over time.
[44:55.260 --> 45:03.540]  Like, if you took a web user from 1995 or something and put them on, you know, one of these pages now, they'd ask, are you nuts?
[45:04.140 --> 45:08.840]  And things that we just don't, you know, the spinning head, I mean, that tipped me over and threw me over the edge.
[45:08.980 --> 45:11.260]  But a lot of people don't even see these things anymore.
[45:11.380 --> 45:13.500]  It goes back to that, kind of that binary ad blindness.
[45:15.380 --> 45:22.200]  There is a class divide and it's as much a technology, a technical skill set divide.
[45:22.380 --> 45:27.160]  The people in this room can employ countermeasures that are somewhat effective.
[45:27.320 --> 45:29.960]  And at the other end of the spectrum, people are just helpless.
[45:30.620 --> 45:35.140]  So that's one of the reasons why I wanted to talk here today is I don't have all the answers.
[45:35.360 --> 45:36.580]  I know people are working on answers.
[45:36.720 --> 45:41.100]  But I think defining a problem well and kind of showing a path, maybe some people will get creative.
[45:41.460 --> 45:44.380]  I wish I could say there's something easy, but I don't see it.
[45:46.300 --> 45:47.820]  Is that a... sir?
[45:48.380 --> 45:49.340]  Just two quick comments.
[45:49.500 --> 45:51.620]  One, you're asking where do people learn interface?
[45:51.760 --> 45:53.040]  I think it's a different mindset.
[45:53.280 --> 45:54.080]  I work with marketing.
[45:56.060 --> 45:58.580]  But we look at and we see, that's awful.
[45:58.740 --> 46:00.700]  Some of them look at, that's wonderful.
[46:01.000 --> 46:02.380]  And it's a completely different mindset.
[46:02.540 --> 46:06.260]  They don't realize anything beyond, they have an idea they want to get forward.
[46:06.380 --> 46:07.220]  They don't realize the downside.
[46:07.440 --> 46:09.160]  Some people are malicious in doing it.
[46:09.280 --> 46:12.680]  But some people are just a completely different mindset than the folks in this room.
[46:12.940 --> 46:15.060]  And the other thing is, you mentioned about ad block.
[46:15.220 --> 46:16.120]  Man, I use an ad block.
[46:16.300 --> 46:21.860]  And my concern, and it took a while before I pushed it to that, because you catch the wheat with the check.
[46:22.280 --> 46:30.380]  There are sites that are unintrusive ads for sites you like that you end up blocking just because you get to a threshold that you can't take.
[46:32.240 --> 46:33.880]  Jumping bunnies and click the monkey.
[46:34.660 --> 46:36.060]  You can't take those anymore.
[46:36.180 --> 46:40.000]  So you end up blocking on sites that you really don't find those ads intrusive.
[46:40.120 --> 46:41.520]  And that's some of the problem.
[46:41.520 --> 46:42.380]  I think right now.
[46:43.020 --> 46:45.240]  Anybody a Greasemonkey user?
[46:46.220 --> 46:47.040]  Comments on that?
[46:47.200 --> 46:48.800]  I mean, does that work for you?
[46:48.960 --> 46:51.440]  Or is it... I mean, it requires a lot of overhead getting these things.
[46:51.700 --> 46:51.840]  No?
[46:51.920 --> 46:52.400]  Not at all.
[46:53.180 --> 46:58.720]  Firefox is a really good ad blocking pre-made modules.
[46:59.100 --> 47:04.200]  There's one called Focus NG, which will upload the news, upload the new ads to be blocked.
[47:04.500 --> 47:09.180]  And I think the community research lab is building an ARC replacement of the ads.
[47:09.320 --> 47:13.620]  So it'll take the space that has been given to ads and replace it with ARC.
[47:13.680 --> 47:14.080]  Nice!
[47:14.200 --> 47:14.380]  It's kind of cool.
[47:14.540 --> 47:16.260]  Like, there are people working with repurposes stuff.
[47:17.700 --> 47:20.100]  It'd be nice to see things like this come out by default.
[47:20.300 --> 47:21.740]  I mean, because we've got some basic stuff.
[47:22.660 --> 47:31.760]  When somebody mentioned this class about in Brazil, where all of a sudden you've got tons and tons and tons of people being introduced to free and open source software.
[47:32.020 --> 47:36.180]  And it may be a question of when you having nobody doing this.
[47:36.300 --> 47:43.900]  But it's not hard to imagine the defaults in Firefox being, you know, ad blockers and kind of avoiding this tyranny of the market.
[47:44.900 --> 47:48.700]  So I mean, that's, I think, a key when it goes back to the question about the masses.
[47:49.040 --> 47:52.100]  It really has to be installed by default and it has to more or less work.
[47:52.280 --> 47:54.640]  But then if it's installed by default, people get mad.
[47:54.800 --> 47:55.840]  People make money off this.
[47:55.920 --> 47:57.320]  They don't take kindly to it.
[47:57.360 --> 47:58.420]  So it's a challenge.
[47:59.320 --> 47:59.720]  Yes?
[47:59.720 --> 48:01.060]  I had a couple things.
[48:01.260 --> 48:05.960]  First off, these guys right here all work for you're angry about this.
[48:08.620 --> 48:13.200]  But two things to answer your first question about where do people learn evil interface.
[48:13.480 --> 48:22.500]  There's actually a fundamental flaw in the advertising industry where if you, if one advertiser sees that another company has real world examples.
[48:22.700 --> 48:24.560]  So let's say UGO is an advertising network.
[48:24.720 --> 48:30.080]  Who has a blatant ass interstitial that expands into a 400 by 400 pixel screen hop over.
[48:30.560 --> 48:37.300]  And our ad network, who I probably can't name here, we go out to salespeople to these media buyers and they say, well why sell this on UGO?
[48:37.400 --> 48:39.700]  If you can't do this for me, I'm not going to give you my money.
[48:39.820 --> 48:44.160]  So it's a self-perpetuating cycle where when one company does it, it just spreads into something.
[48:45.220 --> 48:47.240]  Starts becoming a standard expectation.
[48:47.500 --> 48:54.880]  And the other thing that I thought would be important to include in your presentation that you didn't mention is brand recognition and how that filters in.
[48:54.880 --> 48:58.800]  So, for example, we've run ads for Windex on our sites.
[48:59.100 --> 48:59.880]  Some people hate them.
[48:59.980 --> 49:00.700]  People hate them.
[49:00.860 --> 49:06.100]  But when they see a Dark Knight or a Hellboy ad, they'll put up with even more intrusive advertising.
[49:06.540 --> 49:11.840]  And the advertisers use this and realize that they say, in some of our meetings, they'll say like, oh, this is for washing.
[49:12.040 --> 49:12.740]  There's like a detergent.
[49:12.860 --> 49:13.800]  We have to keep it very minimal.
[49:14.080 --> 49:19.860]  But if we want to go out and do like a World of Warcraft campaign, we can go out and put it in the user space a little bit more because they'll tolerate it.
[49:20.340 --> 49:22.940]  Well, yeah, it gets back to the targeted marketing.
[49:23.120 --> 49:25.260]  When you know what your audience is into, they'll tolerate a lot more.
[49:25.900 --> 49:27.140]  I'd like to ask him a question.
[49:27.960 --> 49:30.340]  Are you up for fielding a question from the...
[49:30.340 --> 49:30.660]  Yes.
[49:31.000 --> 49:31.200]  Sir?
[49:31.720 --> 49:32.300]  You're welcome.
[49:34.460 --> 49:38.020]  Would you be up for fielding a question from the audience or...
[49:38.020 --> 49:38.800]  You
[49:41.940 --> 49:56.320]  know, if you're working with marketing people who have that mindset, why don't you call upon it and say, well, then, you know, people get sick of these ads, they're not going to launch your project and your product, and perhaps, you know, sell them on a different mindset?
[49:56.740 --> 49:58.520]  Or is it just about...
[49:58.520 --> 49:59.160]  Yeah.
[49:59.260 --> 50:00.180]  That's actually what...
[50:00.180 --> 50:01.760]  That's my position in the company.
[50:01.760 --> 50:04.720]  I'm the person who's on the other side of the advertisers, who...
[50:04.720 --> 50:06.920]  We have a sales team and they have a couple of layers.
[50:07.200 --> 50:10.940]  So I'm not allowed to go to the meetings with media buyers because that's how they don't buck themselves.
[50:13.540 --> 50:17.260]  So what our organization tries to do is come up with...
[50:17.260 --> 50:20.800]  And it's actually what we do specifically is we come up with ideas that are...
[50:20.800 --> 50:21.760]  not as intrusive.
[50:21.940 --> 50:25.580]  So we have a set of rules for all of our advertisements with traditional manner ads.
[50:25.720 --> 50:39.120]  But one thing that also hasn't been said here that's important is that there's another issue with the advertising industry, logic, in that when you provide a custom campaign that might be cool, like, for example, we did a machinima contest with HP, the HP Blackbird.
[50:39.300 --> 50:39.860]  They were really good.
[50:40.000 --> 50:42.540]  They came to us and said, what can we do to reach a demographic without pissing them off?
[50:42.800 --> 50:46.600]  So you used to submit videos made in World of Warcraft Counter-Strike.
[50:46.600 --> 50:53.200]  And there was actually one with GLaDOS from Portal that won, where the GLaDOS portal comes in and blows up the blackbird computer.
[50:53.620 --> 50:55.700]  So that's a good example of what we did that was custom.
[50:55.820 --> 50:59.960]  But at the same time, they also said, okay, this custom unit, you're providing a set for free.
[51:00.280 --> 51:03.640]  Now the currency of the advertising unit is still traditional banner ads.
[51:03.900 --> 51:05.220]  They usually have drop-downs, et cetera.
[51:05.540 --> 51:07.340]  So we gave them this free machinima contest.
[51:07.660 --> 51:15.360]  And in exchange, they gave us, let's say, $60,000 worth of banner ads that then, you know, would give, would then account for the currency of it.
[51:15.460 --> 51:17.780]  So you still have to show these annoying traditional units.
[51:17.960 --> 51:26.400]  And we're trying to move more and more away from that and into, like, actually producing high-quality custom units that don't piss people off and pulling the banner ads off all of our websites.
[51:26.820 --> 51:27.220]  Cool.
[51:27.360 --> 51:27.560]  Thanks.
[51:29.320 --> 51:31.200]  One more question, and then we're out of time.
[51:32.440 --> 51:32.840]  Thanks.
[51:32.840 --> 51:35.780]  I think you framed this really well and it's really useful content.
[51:36.620 --> 51:47.240]  And I think you may already be aware that a lot of the people who were affected negatively by these kind of techniques include people with cognitive disabilities and people with visual disabilities.
[51:47.440 --> 51:52.600]  So they are, you know, this is not just a, you know, a minor inconvenience to them or annoyance.
[51:52.680 --> 51:56.520]  This is a, I cannot use the web anymore because of these techniques.
[51:56.880 --> 51:59.380]  Now we have great tools to counter that.
[51:59.380 --> 52:09.580]  We have laws like Section 508 here in the U.S. and web standards like Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that come out of W3C.
[52:09.940 --> 52:24.720]  And I would encourage people to look at those as ways that they can persuade clients, persuade their own developers, don't use these and don't aggregate sites that use these techniques either because they're out of compliance with laws in many ways.
[52:24.980 --> 52:25.920]  Very good point.
[52:26.160 --> 52:26.560]  Okay.
[52:26.700 --> 52:31.200]  Well, I'm going to go out into the hallway just as a courtesy to the next speaker and be happy to chat with anybody.
[52:31.440 --> 52:33.500]  And if survey guy, it would be great.
[52:33.680 --> 52:34.060]  Thank you.
[52:40.010 --> 52:49.430]  I had to cringe when you were like, oh, this is going to happen in virtual worlds because I did usability for Second Life last year, which, believe me, was a nightmare and a half because there is no usability in Second Life.
[52:50.390 --> 52:53.830]  It's all like flaming horn particles.
[52:55.290 --> 52:58.910]  But I wanted to see if I could get your contact information for a couple of reasons.
[52:59.190 --> 53:00.550]  Are you here for the whole conference?
[53:00.790 --> 53:01.850]  They run now on the J spirit.
[53:02.070 --> 53:02.230]  Right now.
[53:02.230 --> 53:02.350]  I want to work on Geoff.
[53:02.350 --> 53:02.810]  So thank you.
[53:02.890 --> 53:03.090]  Thank you.
[53:03.090 --> 53:03.210]  you from island,