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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.
Microsoft's design of the Windows 10 upgrade dialog box was a great example of how to trick users into accidentally upgrading, even when they didn't want to.
Another one: charging a low price for a product on Amazon, then setting an exorbitant shipping and handling fee, which nearly doubles the price. I've seen this one fairly recently. The shipping fee is every bit as much of the price, but it's displayed only in tiny fonts compared to the main listing.
Is it any wonder that UX designers are getting a horrible reputation among some segments of the tech-savvy crowd? It's going to suck if consumers get pissed off enough about this that government regulators have to step in, and then anyone putting up an e-commerce website is going to have to wade through layers upon layers of government bureaucracy. Maybe that's inevitable, but it's annoying how it always devolves into that...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I've seen a ton of sites do that. Makes the advertisers happy, but pisses off everyone else.
On social media, if I find something like that, if I care to wait through it, I summarize and write a brief transcript, then tell people to be happy that I saved them 30 minutes for one paragraph of text.
Notice how news sites like CNN are gradually going all video? And not the good videos that explain a lot succinctly or put you into a snippet of the news action, but those excruciating new wastes of bandwidth that just display story text, in a giant font, screen after screen, backed by nothing but a musical bed, until you realize that you have spent ten minutes watching one paragraph of text.
Yeah, it's like a powerpoint presentation set to music.
I don't think it's possible to get the information to bandwidth ratio any lower than that, but I guess I shouldn't underestimate marketing and management. I'm sure they'll think of something.
'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.
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.
United Airlines flight 232 crashed into an Iowa cornfield while attempting to land. A turbine in the #2 engine flew apart mid-flight due to a manufacturing defect, severing all the hydraulic lines. The crew controlled the plane with differential thrust from the two remaining engines, and frankly it was a miracle they even made it to the runway. Roughly a third of the people aboard were killed.
One of those killed was a lap child - a child flying without a paid seat, and thus held on a parent's lap during the flight. This presented a problem during the emergency landing. Lead flight attenand Jan Lohr followed FAA procedure and instructed the parents to put the child underneath the seat in front like a carry-on bag. After the accident, the mother (who survived) came up to Jan and, in tears, told her "I did what you told me to do, and I can't find my child."
Jan was beset with guilt, and began a quarter-century crusade to outlaw the practice of lap children. That any child flying should be required to have their own seat with a crash safety seat like we use in cars. She even testified about her experience before Congress. It all came for naught when in 2012 the FAA issued its final decision that lap children would still be allowed. A victory for the selfish, self-centered stockholders and management behind the evil airlines, right?
Not so fast. See, here's the thing. Flying is really, really safe. Due to the irrational nature of people's emotional mind, we fixate on large accidents while multiple small ones slip by unnoticed. So every time an airliner crashes, it makes national if not worldwide headlines. But if there's a car accident nearby, even your local news station is unlikely to cover it. Consequently we've spent decades concentrating on making flying disproportionately super-safe. The FAA crunched the numbers, and determined that if a family with a child decided to travel for vacation, the odds of the child dying in a plane accident - as a lap child - were lower than the odds of the child dying in a car accident while strapped into a car seat. So to encourage people to fly instead of drive with their child on vacation, they allow the family to fly without having to pay for an extra seat for the child.
The lap child policy saves lives, despite its horrific outcome when the statistics don't work your way and there's a lap child aboard a plane which does crash. (As for forcing airlines to give children a free seat, that doesn't work either because they don't know until the time of the flight exactly how many people will be aboard. The way the industry operates is to slightly overbook because on average a certain percentage of people will miss their flights. When that gambit fails and more people show up for the flight than there are seats on the plane, someone has to be bumped off the flight. Forcing them to hold an unknown number of seats in reserve for "surprise" undeclared children would shift the number of passengers for a "booked" flight down, forcing them to raise the per-seat price, which again would encourage parents of young children to drive instead of fly.)
Morality is hard.