Week 10 Session: Benevolent Deception

Week 10. Delay added rather than removed, and the question of who an added second is for.

3 May 2027

The course has been arguing that waiting is designed. This is the week where that stops being a figure of speech.

Adar, Tan and Teevan argue that deception is already everywhere in interface design and that the useful question is who benefits, not whether it is happening. Brignull spent a decade naming the version where the answer is the company, and the vocabulary he built is now in regulatory findings.

Read them together and notice that the techniques overlap almost completely. The difference is not in the mechanism. It is in who the mechanism is pointed at, which is a sentence you should recognise by now.

In the workshop#

Each of you brings one added delay and argues it both ways in two minutes. The room votes, and then you say which side you actually believe. The gap between the argument you could make and the one you hold is the thing worth noticing.

But wait, there’s more#

Some installers show a progress bar on a local file operation that completes instantly, because a task that finishes before you see it starts reads as a task that was not done. The bar is not reporting the work. It is issuing a receipt for it.