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Dark Patterns Across the Web Are Designed To Trick You
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: Harry Brignell has posted a 30-minute video documenting dark patterns, deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces (not exclusive to the internet) that trick users into setting up recurring payments, purchasing items added to a shopping cart, or spamming all contacts through pre-checked forms on Facebook games for example. Basically, they're tactics used by online services to get users to do things they wouldn't normally do. Yael Grauer has written an in-depth report on Ars Technica about dark patterns, where he discusses Brignull's work with UX designers and business executives: "Klein [Principal at Users Known and author of UX for Lean Startups] believes many of the worst dark patterns are pushed by businesses, not by designers. 'It's often pro-business at the expense of the users, and the designers often see themselves as the defender or advocate of the user,' she explained. And although Brignull has never been explicitly asked to design dark patterns himself, he said he has been in situations where using them would be an easy solution -- like when a client or boss says they really need a large list of people who have opted in to marketing e-mails. 'The first and easiest trick to have an opt-in is to have a pre-ticked checkbox, but then you can just get rid of that entirely and hide it in the terms of conditions and say that by registering you're going to be opted in to our e-mails,' Brignull said. 'Then you have a 100-percent sign-up rate and you've exceeded your goals. I kind of understand why people do it. If you're only thinking about the numbers and you're just trying to juice the stats, then it's not surprising in the slightest.' 'There's this logical positivist mindset that the only things that have value are those things that can be measured and can empirically be shown to be true, and while that has its merits it also takes us down a pretty dark place,' said digital product designer Cennydd Bowles, who is researching ethical design. 'We start to look at ethics as pure utilitarianism, whatever benefits the most people. Yikes, it has problems.'" Brignull's website has a number of examples of deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces.
I might watch that video if it weren't trying to trick me into wasting 30 minutes to see the 6 examples that are the actual content.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign
Really... "Dark Patterns"? There's no way that will catch on.
I hate it when anybody who has me in their address book signs up for those things. :(
Our ticket system constantly gets invites from LinkedIn
I've been noticing the progression. These days I'm thankful if there is an X somewhere so I can exit without clicking.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
(APOLOGIES for being off topic but...[...])
APK
Oh, the irony.
The exquisite irony.
2. Bad actors exist and the internet allows them to hide things so that users select things they normally would not.
3. Bad actors are often inside of what most people consider "reputable" companies.
4. Morality is hard and the bad actors in charge of stuff tend to push for lots number 2 (I had to skip "1" for the irony).
You knew all this stuff already, or should have. We have a justice system which is supposed to handle companies breaching moral code, or what we call law. The problem is obviously how to make things visible to the user, which given the desires of HTML and JavaScript won't happen. setAttribute("type", "hidden"); has valid purposes as well as nefarious. Such is the nature of tools. I guess secondarily the punishment for bad actors may not fit the crime, but again we have a justice system for that.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is Slashdot, we don't read TFS nor TFA so keep it short 'n sweet
We're aware. It will be remedied soon.
It is much easier to fix than most people think. Basically you just have to allow end users to choose to make undesirable sites disappear. Basically the user should be allowed to ban those sites from say search results or advertising. A reasonable end user choice, had a bad experience with the company, don't want to deal with them any more, fine lock them out from accessing your digital mind space, no search results, no ads. Of course certain companies would have to agree or be forced to agree to end user choices, sort a digital right to your own eyeballs to not see what you do not want to see, a right corporations seem desperate to take away, as in force you to see what they want to see whether or not you want to see it. A new kind of privacy, the private right to keep you mind free of interactions with shitty companies. Individually it does not count for much but those companies do not screw over individually, they screw over everyone the meet and hence those blocks over time have real bite and kill companies over time. There should be a right to individually block content, to not be forced to see it prior to shutting it down, to enable you to choose to never see it again, that should be a real profound right of choice for all of us.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Really APK? I would have figured you'd like "Flawless Independent Bangalore Escorts Girls", I mean you could tell them about your HOSTS file. I'm sure that'd get 'em real wet
The EFF bloggedabout deliberately misleading UI design over 6 years ago, going with the name 'Evil Interfaces.' My favorite alternate name was 'confuser interface design', by the way. 'Dark patterns' is so vague as to be useless.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Wow, it just goes to show you the strange things that happen to people when they are required to think of themselves in a good light. DESIGNERS, of all people, being friends of the users? Absurd!
Designers are the ones who change interfaces for no reason, remove options, and generally screw up things that already work well. If Designers don't do this, they feel unsatisfied and unhappy. Users scream about it, but Designers handwave it away with pithy statements like "people are always going to complain, there's no pleasing them." Meanwhile the new design has half the capabilities of the old one, or (my favorite) only allows for a certain kind of use, the one that the designer thought of. Try to use the interface in a way they didn't think of, and it won't work.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
'There's this logical positivist mindset that the only things that have value are those things that can be measured and can empirically be shown to be true, and while that has its merits it also takes us down a pretty dark place,' said digital product designer Cennydd Bowles, who is researching ethical design. 'We start to look at ethics as pure utilitarianism, whatever benefits the most people. Yikes, it has problems.'
What the heck is this supposed to have to do with anything?? First off, logical positivism is an early to mid 20th-century philosophical movement that embraced the idea of verification as the basis of truth. There are all sorts of things we could say about this philosophical movement, but I have no clue what it could possibly have to do with "Dark Patterns" or immoral web design. There's no reason verificationism inevitably leads one to a "dark place," whatever that means.
Yet we then jump to this idea of utilitarianism, yet another philosophical term that seems out of place. Yes, the stereotype of extreme utilitarians is that they will justify all sorts of weird ethically questionable behavior "for the sake of the greater good," like the doctor who would kill the live healthy dude who wanders into the hospital if he could save five other dying people with the organs. Most utilitarians aren't that crazy.
But again, I'm not sure what this has to do with "dark patterns" or web design, because it's pretty clear that these things probably DON'T do "the greatest good for the most people" -- in fact, they are ways of stealing wealth from large amounts of stupid people (who probably don't have that much money to spare, on average) and concentrating it among a few people. That's actually pretty much the opposite of utilitarian reasoning.
And I still have no clue what utilitarianism (an ethical philosophy) has to do with logical positivism (which has to do with epistemology, or the basis of knowledge). It would be quite possible to subscribe to one and not the other, or neither, or whatever -- they simply have little to do with each other. I'm not sure how empirical verification of stuff to determine truth inevitably leads to a MORAL argument around utilitarianism (which isn't usually something "verifiable" in the normal scientific sense)... and neither of these seem to have anything to do with "evil" web design.
The only thing I can figure is that this person is some sort of anti-science religious nutjob who thinks that dependence on scientific reasoning leads to moral decay or something, and they're just using "utilitarian" as a code word for "bad moral system."
This is one of the most muddled things I've seen in a Slashdot summary recently (and that's saying something)... and this person is supposedly "researching" ethical web design?? I think you might want to learn English first or some basic logic before you start throwing around irrelevant philosophical terms.
I enjoyed it, I know this goes against all the rules of /. to say so without snarky referential caveat overlord.
The EU law on digital marketing is clear: If I have not given explicit permission for a company to send me mail, they may not do so. At least here in Denmark there is a nice system for reporting spammers, and every now and then companies get big fines and bad publicity for spamming. And I really mean explicit permission, it has to be an active choice from my part. No pre-checked subscription boxes or automatic newsletters. Even if I do business with a company, they are only allowed to send mail directly related to that business, for example to inform me about delays in shipping. Advertising for other stuff they decide I might like is against the law. The system works pretty well, I get almost no spam from Danish companies, and very little from EU. But a lot from the US, and other foreign countries where EU law does not apply.
Videos are the least efficient way of conveying information over the net. That's why video reviews and video guides are worthless waste of bandwith. Videos are good for one purpose: Entertainment.
Did the OP read TFA before posting it here?
Every. Single. Time. you enable GPS on your phone in Marshmallow, Google services prompts you to permanently allow Google to collect location data from your phone - this only goes away if you accept, it never goes away if you deny.
Apparently the only way to get rid of this without accepting, is to actually root your phone and use a custom xposed framework addon, explicitly for getting rid of that prompt.
Perfect example of a 'Dark Pattern' in a user interface.
The author wants to make UX designers out to be activists fighting the user's corner, but the reality is if the UX designer chooses to take the easy way out to meet targets set by management, that's a decision by the designer. To quote:
"Klein [Principal at Users Known and author of UX for Lean Startups] believes many of the worst dark patterns are pushed by businesses, not by designers. 'It's often pro-business at the expense of the users, and the designers often see themselves as the defender or advocate of the user,' she explained. And although Brignull has never been explicitly asked to design dark patterns himself, he said he has been in situations where using them would be an easy solution -- like when a client or boss says they really need a large list of people who have opted in to marketing e-mails. 'The first and easiest trick to have an opt-in is to have a pre-ticked checkbox, but then you can just get rid of that entirely and hide it in the terms of conditions and say that by registering you're going to be opted in to our e-mails,' Brignull said. 'Then you have a 100-percent sign-up rate and you've exceeded your goals. I kind of understand why people do it."
How is this not a decision by the designer?
Right after the a-with-a-hat(TM) bug?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This has been going on since we could count. What I saw in business is that what gets counted gets "optimized". The problem is that what is counted tends to be an indicator or performance, not the actual performance. A big example is product shipped being an indicator of success. You get managers pushing stuff out the door months before it should be simply to make their numbers look good. The same with opt in shenanigans. What they really want is a list of people who will buy the product, not a list they can send advertising to that will then be ignored. But big numbers are better than small numbers, particularly to people who are "playing the game" as opposed to "doing the job".
Working for unethical or immoral companies is protecting users? That's like saying a concentration camp guard leading people to the gas chambers can protect the victims.
Your time would be better spent writing plugins to detect and flag shady practices. Quit now while you still have a soul.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I loved how he explained the seduction of good designers into doing evil work.
I must say I found Ryanair to be particularly evil.
In order to NOT buy insurance, you have to go to the drop down box labeled "Select your Country", and find "No Insurance Required", which is in the middle of the L's (not even in the "N" s).
Frankly, they should be sued. That's nothing less than outright fraud in my book.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This term is old... definitions that don't change are GOOD.
It was a live presentation, and the video did a good job as far as videos go. Live presentations work well with humans. Harder for audience to pick and choose facts out of the presentation, like many readers HERE often do.
Audience becomes invested in the presentation (time spent to date)
The promised Q&A at the end encourages careful listening and then actual discourse on the issue.
The purpose of the presentation and video? Get people talking. Unfortunately here on Slashdot we get more keyboard-twerking than actual discussion.
Load the site, get three seconds of viewing before some custom dialog in thrown in your face that blocks the contents wanting you to complete a survey or sign up for email spam. More often than not it seems like the method to close it is obfuscated or the exit button is tiny enough you have to squint to see it.
I don't bother trying to play their game of trying to find the exit, when there are extensions like this that always give you a consistent method for brushing that shit aside. These days, this and an ad blocker seem to be necessary for a decent browsing experience anymore.
People attempting to simplify everything as positive and negative are a huge part of the problem. The world is not, nor will it ever be, purely good or evil.
Having high moral standards is not always easy. Your morality to you is easy, but your morality differs from the rest of society by at least a little, and probably much more than you think.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
... a bunch of corporate asshats who were first against the wall when the revolution came. ...
If anyone wants to know why companies are hated more than roaches, its shit like this. honestly, i dont want society to fall apart, JUST so I could see the look on corporate asshats as somone dismembered them + their friends. But they would deserve it.
>...you have a 100-percent sign-up rate and you've exceeded your goals.
OK, if goals are constantly being exceeded by 100% and managers/reviewers know that that is due to forced participation by default- wouldn't one just ignore the 'success' then? I mean can you really pat your team's back if they just watch an automatic process?
I'd be more interested in the metrics of un-subscribing & read vs unread emails (hello web beacons, you little tattletales you).
Not dark patterns.
I have a strict rule to never ever F ever sign up for any newsletters or mailing-lists, or anything like that
So if i ever receive anything like that, that means its from ass-hats/creeps/criminals.
I always report them as spammers/malware if available, and block permanently.
I don't care if its from kittens4cancerchildren,
sign me up for something i never asked for, and you are on my kill-list.
The Easy-Out is to go straight to your credit card company and assert that the charge was unauthorized. This puts the vendor using the dark pattern on the defensive. If your bank is a major bank and the vendor has too many unauthorized charge reports they could face loosing charge processing privileges that would impact their bottom line and motivate them to change their ways. Don't fall for the Difficult-Out trap, use the 900 pound gorilla in your corner. My credit card companies have always been very responsive to these complaints and I have always eventually (e.g. 120 days) been notified that my account has been credited with very little effort on my part and the process being driven by the credit card company.
These practices are not new nor limited to the new frontier of the web. Grocery stores have been placing the most frequently purchased items AT THE BACK OF THE STORE forcing consumers to walk by alllllllll their wares. The lost-leader technique is another example of what this article would label 'black' merchandising. What about the practise of deep discounting on scarcely stocked products to get consumers to walk in? How about insidiously placing IMPULSE buys at the checkout. Capitalist dogs! Who will think of the children? Who will think of the children?
I never understood why overbooking is allowed. People should be free to pay for seats and not use them, and the airline should not care if there is a body in a paid seat or not. If the airline does resell those seats, that means they sold the same thing twice, and they should pay the first person back. At no point should it be acceptable to cause people to lose flights because of this, without significant penalties to the airline doing it.