Annoying the user can be a feature
Google typically has a minimalist aesthetic, so why does Gmail display an obnoxious yellow box whenever you go “invisible” in Talk? Economics to the explanatory rescue!
For those of you who don’t know, when you’re “invisible,” you can see and IM other people who are online but other people can’t see you. This asymmetry can yield a classic free-rider problem — I can get the benefit of bothering people without risking the potential distraction or pain of talking to someone I don’t want to, but in doing so I make the service less useful to others who would wish to bother me.
So if it were really easy to be invisible, then on balance too many people might go invisible, making the feature useless for everyone. The annoying box makes me far more likely to stay visible, forcing me to give back a little bit.
Of course people go invisible all of the time — there are times when it’s worth it to avoid the distraction — but unless I’m specifically avoiding distractions I typically stay visible because it’s just a tiny bit annoying to be invisible.
Windows Vista’s UAC dialogs were supposed to be annoying as well. The idea was that developers would want to avoid annoying their users by using unsafe OS calls and so software written for Windows would become more secure making things in aggregate better for users. In this instance it seems users wound up blaming Windows more than software developers, but it may have actually pushed developers to be more safe. Windows 7 users will likely benefit from the pain that Vista users suffered.
