Monday, November 29, 2010

Credit company rhetoric [Design is Dangerous]

Have you ever actually through the printed terms and conditions of a given loan service before signing your soul away to your credit company? Chances are the answer is no. Aside from your laziness, there is a reason for that: they are designed that way on purpose. Credit companies have layout designers who purposely draft obscure layouts for the mandatory issue terms and conditions. This is obviously to discourage most of the company's customers from reading or having a chance to understand their rights and the customer service policies and thus take advantage. The actual layout is normally printed in an incredibly small font (maybe 6 point) with unbearably tight leading and tracking printed on a light grey paper with a slightly darker grey or tan ink. This almost immediately rules out the ability for people with sight problems or reading accessibility issues to even have a chance to read them, let alone able people.
But even if you had the ability and patience to read through them, you would immediately be bombarded with numerous abbreviations and cryptically convoluted rhetoric, making it a challenge to even understand, given you are not the lawyer who wrote the passage.

Such design for the sole purpose of inaccessibility is dangerous in that it allows these companies to easily take advantage of their customers. Some amount of government regulations would be necessary in order to defend society against such dubious immoral business tactics.

Is design really ethical? Just because it can and should be does not mean that it is. Just like any other trade, it could be used for moral or immoral purposes.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers

Powered by Blogger.