User Control Perception
Human need for control can be traced back to our earliest roots. Our most basic needs are health, food, and sleep. All of these require a significant amount of control over our environment in order to gather food, and control over our own choices to avoid disease. So it isn't surprising that we seek out control in everything from our relationships to our environment. It's ingrained in us, and it gives us a sense of comfort and well being. This sense of control is very closely linked to what psychologists call an internal locus of control, or the belief that our actions have the power to impact and change a given situation. People with an internal locus of control are more likely to be confident, take better care of themselves, and have lower levels of stress.
As UX designers, we try to ensure users will have positive experiences when using our apps. In other words, we manipulate them into thinking they have been empowered. Nadine Kintscher, a UX consultant at Sitback Solutions stated that we have all these controls for our smart phones from dimming the display to disabling notification which only extend the battery life by a few minutes but it gives us the warm and fuzzy feeling of being in charge. From Kintscher’s perspective, the perception of control is more important than the user’s actual ability to control the phone’s battery life.
UX designers have long made the case for deceiving the user. Everyone from Instagram to Microsoft has used deception as a tool in improving the user experience. The Instagram app is designed to function even without a connection, storing every action locally until the data or wifi connection is reestablished. When the user presses "like," the system did not upload it and their friend doesn't get to see it. But it's only a little white lie; as soon as the app is back online it will pass along the "like." Another example is the progress bar. Whether downloading content on a Mac or a PC, we’ve all experienced a progress bar at some point. This keeps us informed with a xxx minute left notification that lasts longer or shorter. Obviously, anyone who stops to think about it can recognize the discrepancy between the amount of time stated and the amount of time we wait, but the lying progress bar continues.
"Everyone does it" is not an excuse for lying, deceiving, or manipulating users. We live in the Information Age, and knowledge is power. We can see the proof of our collective desire for knowledge by looking at the daily articles about Facebook, Google, Android, and Amazon for hiding or not sharing information we feel that the public deserves to know. The information they "hide" ranges from details about our privacy settings, to critical explanations of who owns our data and who might be able to track our locations. We want to know the truth, so that we can make our own decisions.
The issue is that we can't handle the truth, When users are faced with all possible information and infinite options, decision paralysis sets in and they can't focus on the task at hand. Information without context is not particularly valuable. It's difficult to balance. But, without outright lying to users, we may choose to control their experience in a variety of ways. Whether or not this deception is ethically proper is for each individual designer to consider, for each individual scenario.
Give users control over the inconsequential. It's the reason banks allow us to choose profile pictures, and credit cards ask us to customize our card photos,. Far from feeling trivial, these small decisions give us ownership and control over things which ultimately distract us from the fact that we have no say in the decisions that matter.
The ethics regarding placebo UX are complex. Placebos are hotly contested in the medical realm. In the UX realm, they have nearly no chance of doing actual physical harm, and at times they are barely even a deception. The "refresh" button on many sites does nothing, since site is automatically updating anyhow, but it provide a refreshed view of the site. Uber is based on the premise that users would prefer to track and thus feel some measure of control over where their ride is coming from, even though the phone app does nothing to actually reduce wait times. As designers we take on the responsibility of determining when users need control, when they need safety, and when they need the illusion of control. So long as we keep the goal of helping users at the heart of every decision, we can maintain our ethics and make decisions with confidence.