Presenting ads without the ability to close them; hiding buttons that users shouldn’t click with diminutive, lightly shaded text; and redirecting users on a website away from their intended destination are textbook shadowy patterns, says Johanna Gunawan, a professor of computer science and law at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. But what bothered her most about MyMove was the context. Users may be prepared for dishonest design on a storefront, but not when registering to vote.
When Rybak checked her email after leaving the MyMove website, she found it filled with messages from advertisers she was trying to avoid. She also received an email from MyMove saying her voter registration was almost complete. All she had to do was print the form, fill it out and mail it to the election office. If all this has to be done anyway, Rybak wondered, what’s the point of the MyMove website?
There doesn’t seem to be one if you just want to register to vote.
In a statement, MyMove told WIRED that anyone who begins the online voter registration process will receive a “quick” email with instructions on how to complete and submit the required form, “regardless of whether they choose to take advantage of moving promotional offers.”
“We understand that online experiences, especially those related to civic processes, require special attention,” MyMove wrote. “We regularly review and improve our user experience and use customer feedback to update our products.”
“Highest level of quality”
By the early 1990s, Brett Matthews was already a successful entrepreneur. He worked for a company that produced information brochures about medical conditions, paid for by drug and supplement manufacturers, that doctors could read and hang in their offices. One day, while filling out a change of address postcard, which used to be a way of notifying moving companies of modern mailing addresses, Matthews was inspired to start a modern brokerage company.
Matthews and his wife, Virginia Salazar, started a company called Targeted Marketing Solutions and began calling the Postal Service with a proposal: a public-private partnership in which they would update and manage the agency’s address change process for free; USPS will then allow them to package coupons and offers from advertisers into a physical welcome kit that will be mailed to each mover’s modern home.
Matthews, who is now an executive at a plant-based nutritional shake company, tells WIRED that he and Salazar had to contact USPS 20 times before they got in the door. Even after gaining the attention of postal officials, their proposal became mired in government lawsuits, privacy concerns and a debate over whether the welcome kits would suggest that the U.S. government endorsed the brands advertised in them.
In 1992, USPS agreed to pilot the program. Until 1995, Targeted Marketing Solutions had an exclusive, nationwide contract. In 1997, vice president Al Gore named the company prize for reinventing government. “Our goal, broadly speaking, is to restore the original meaning of the phrase ‘good enough for government work,’ so that in a few years that phrase means the best, highest quality,” Gore said before presenting Matthews with the honor.