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.

Comments

dark patterns huh?

[supernova87a]

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.

Re:dark patterns huh?

[arth1]

That was my thought too - a video?
AV is notoriously imprecise, and tricks people into judging by how they feel about the presentation instead of the actual contents.

And, of course, as the old sysadmin adage goes, a picture takes up more bandwidth than a thousand words. And video is orders of magnitude worse.

I also thought the new owners here listened to the discussion right after they took over, where they asked whether /.ers wanted video links or not. Overwhelmingly, we did not.

Re:dark patterns huh?

[mrbester]

Sounds like you ascribed a lack of value to it based on the delivery medium and thus didn't even click the link. Congratulations, you just applied a dark pattern to yourself as described in TFS, which is exactly what those who would utilise them hope for; that you don't know it is happening and that you wouldn't care if you did.

This isn't positivist enough for you, so you'll ignore this as well.

Re:dark patterns huh?

[Jiro]

Sounds like you ascribed a lack of value to it based on the delivery medium and thus didn't even click the link. Congratulations, you just applied a dark pattern to yourself as described in TFS,

This is nonsense.

1) It isn't a dark pattern unless someone is trying to trick him into not viewing the article.

2) The delivery medium actually makes the article lower in value. Taking 30 minutes to watch something that can be read in 2 minutes is a waste of time, and having to waste your time to get it reduces its value.

Make Corrupt sites Disappear

[rtb61]

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.

Dark Patterns?

[mentil]

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.

Re:Non sequiturs?

[Pfhorrest]

The unnecessary use of at best slightly applicable philosophical terms made me do a double-take too, but after applying the principle of charity (another philosophical concept: try to interpret a text in such a way as it makes the most sense possible) I think that they were going for is "positivism" as in "verificationism" as in "only the things we can (easily) measure matter" as in "all we care about are the numbers (that we've chosen to care about, e.g. the number of people on our mailing list, and not any of that hard-to-quantify-but-maybe-more-important stuff)", and then "utilitarianism" as in "the ends justifies the means" as in "it doesn't matter what else (e.g. that hard-to-quantify stuff) we have to sacrifice, we'll do anything to get our special chosen numbers higher!"