Taking advantage of "reflexive" responses in users

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Just came across a Web page trick that fascinated me, and that I think might
have applications in technical communication (though I'll have to think
about this a bit to figure out just what those applications are):

While waiting for a Web search to complete and for the results page to
finish displaying, a banner ad popped up--only I didn't realize it was an
ad, because it resembled the sort of Windows dialog box you often see when a
page tells Internet Explorer to open a second browser window (e.g., a
popup). The contents of the faux-window didn't interest me, so I reflexively
clicked on the Close box to banish the window from my screen. To my
simultaneous horror and delight, I ended up on the advertiser's page. (You
can imagine how relieved I am that this wasn't a porn site, since I was
searching at work.) As anyone more alert than I might have realized, the
entire dialog box was actually an image map. (The telltale rectangle and the
fact that it loaded before the rest of the page should have warned me.)
While I greatly admire the cleverness of the anonymous programmer who
understood (and manipulated) my behavior so expertly, I'm not going to tell
you the URL because I don't support this kind of trick marketing.

So the techwr-l tie-in: A small voice is telling me we could use this kind
of predictable response in technical communication, but I'm drawing a blank
right now. Suggestions anyone?

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite
of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."--Niels Bohr,
physicist (1885-1962)