Since the time I watched the movie Se7en, I have been fascinated with how to exploit the seven weaknesses of biblical proportions in UI design and the world of business. My hypothesis is that successful business models build on gratifying one or more of these sins.
Infact you can build a highly successful web service by combining more than one of these weaknesses. Twitter for example combines the basic human need of self expression and laziness (who is going to write more than 140 characters). Urbantouch beautifully combines greed, sloth, pride and envy. We did design work for Rangde, based on this philosophy and the design had a great outcome in terms of user engagement and conversions.
Brad Feld recently noted this in his article on gamification of universe, which I think has origins in this hypothesis (that is a subject matter of a different blog post though).
If I ever do a PhD thesis, exploiting deadly sins for the purpose of UI design is a topic I would surely consider :)
