Don’t do that, you fool!
I once wrote that as UX designers, we have made the wrong things easy (blogpost in Dutch). That also seems to be the case for something that is currently a trending topic in The Netherlands: sending dickpics.
There’s been a lot of controversy in my country lately about sexual misconduct by powerful men. Recently at the TV show The Voice of Holland and now the director of our biggest football club Ajax (and former star player) Marc Overmars stepped down, over sexual misconduct. That is: he sent dickpics to female employees of the club.
It got me (and many others) thinking: why on Earth do men send dickpics? I’ve never sent one, nor can I imagine ever doing it.
I believe BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model can shed some light on this phenomenon. When people do something, there has to be motivation and a trigger. I can’t look in the Marc Overmars’ brain, and I don’t know what triggered him to send those pictures. But there is a third element of Fogg’s model that can help us understand it: ability. The higher the ability, the more likely an action will take place. I’m going to guess that Overmars used WhatsApp or iMessage to send pictures of his pee-pee. As we all know, with these apps it’s incredibly easy to send pictures. In other words: his ability to send a dickpic was very high.
Ability also works the other way around: the harder something is to do, the less likely it is someone will do it. So if we make it harder to send unwanted pictures, it won’t happen as much. Now I’m wondering if Facebook and Apple are already working on Machine Learning algorithms to implement dick-filters in WhatsApp and iMessage:
“That looks like a penis in this photo.
Are you sure you want to send it to <name>?”
Instead of a simple [Yes] or [No], maybe the app could give more choices, like:
[Yes, she’ll appreciate it!]
[Not now, maybe later]
[Help me decide]
[On second thought, no]
And then if on that same screen, there would be a line like “In The Netherlands, sending unsolicited sexual images is against the law”, with a link to more information, I’m pretty darn sure we would see a sharp drop in dickpic-traffic.
Will we actually see this kind of feature soon? Probably not. But I wouldn’t be surprised either. After all, we have seen before that tech companies develop features that make unwanted behavior harder. Like Twitter making it more difficult to retweet fake news. Or when Apple wanted to scan US iPhones for images of child sexual abuse.
Seeing the release of dickpic-blocking features in messaging apps would be rather interesting. But at the same time, I believe it would send the wrong signal. Because such a feature would basically be about protecting the offender. It would prevent these men from making bad choices, rather than change who they are. It would shift the responsibility from the user to the app.
Maybe society doesn’t need better tools, but simply less fools.