Evil patterns

All of this information is common knowledge amoung designers and devs but was originally written for an iternal blog. Even if you already know all of this, please give it a read and enjoy.

Dark Patterns are deceptive UX/UI interactions, designed to mislead or trick users to make them do something they don’t want to do. This term was coined in 2010 after the boom of ecommerce industries on the web. In order to generate more sales, get subscriptions, and hit target numbers in transactions etc., designers and business associates started creating deceiving user interfaces to manipulate users.

Dark Patterns Types

Bait and Switch

You set out to do one thing, but something, undesirable thing happens instead.

2016, Microsoft started offering upgrades to Windows 10. As the year progressed their attempts to get you to upgrade became increasingly deceptive. They switched the meaning of the “X” button at the top right to mean the opposite of what it normally means. We all know how the close button works, but in 2016, they switched it to be “yes, i want to upgrade”.

Confirmshaming

The act of guilting the user into opting for something. The option to decline is worded in such a way as to shame the user into compliance.

Cookies! Not the good kind. The kind that you’re asked to accept every time you go to any website. And when you say no, it tells you that the site wont work as it is intended for you. That site is going to work fine either way, except you might not be followed around the web by adds from one place to another.

Disguised Ads

Adverts that are disguised as other kinds of content or navigation, in order to get you to click on them.

Some popular software download sites do this. One of their sources of revenue is display advertising. They often run advertisements that look like a download button, tricking users into clicking on the ads rather than getting the thing they wanted.

Forced Continuity

When your free trial with a service comes to an end and your credit card silently starts getting charged without any warning. In some cases this makes it even worse by making it difficult to cancel the membership.

Amazon Prime does this very well. It has created an ecosystem where you get great rewards and are convinced into never leaving.

Friend Spam

The product asks for your email or social media permissions under the pretence it will be used for a desirable outcome (e.g., finding friends), but then spams all your contacts in a message that claims to be from you.

FarmVille is an old example of this. Not so long ago it was common for notifications in facebook to be constantly from people asking for you to send them gifts or lives in one game or another. These games would have a button saying something along the lines of “Ask Friends”.

Hidden Costs

This will cost $XX.XX* *and $X.XX for delivery.

You get to the last step of the checkout process, only to discover some unexpected charges have appeared, e.g., delivery charges, tax, etc.

Amazon again are the kings of this. It constantly tells you that there is free delivery on items, but when you get to the check out its suddenly tell you that you haven’t got enough to qualify. But Amazon very kindly offer you a solution, you can get unlimited free delivery and many more extras by joining Prime.

Misdirection

The design purposefully focuses your attention on one thing in order to distract you attention from another.

Buttons are probably the most obvious one of these. Often the cancel button or unsubscribe is tiny, a hard to see colour or even better, doesn’t actually say unsubscribe. Try and find the unsubscribe on a email to understand this one better.

Price Comparison Prevention

You want to see the difference? Unfortunately no, you’re not allowed.

The retailer makes it hard for you to compare the price of an item with another item, so you cannot make an informed decision.

Some sites will hide the option to view more than one item, others just block it altogether.

Privacy Zuckering

Mark Zuckerburg actually has one named after him.

You are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to. Named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook constantly asks you to add more information to your profile; image, name, email, phone number, astrological position of mercury in retrograde , etc. We all know why they want this information. They want to sell us stuff and they actually want us to buy what they are showing us, so how better to do so than by targeting them to you with things they’ve decided might be of interest to you because of what you have in your profile.

I would recommend watching “The Great Hack” on Netflix, while it isn’t necessarily about Facebook ads, it does highlight how much data can be skimmed from profiles on the social network.

Roach Motel

You get into a situation very easily, but then you find it is hard to get out of it (e.g., a premium subscription).

Real world example: Casinos… they are designed to keep you in them and to never leave. They are dark, no natural light, bright lights and cheap drinks. All designed to stop you from ever wanting to leave.

Sneak into Basket

Add to cart… but we will add an extra few bits that you didn’t ask for.

You attempt to purchase something, but somewhere in the purchasing journey the site sneaks an additional item into your basket, often through the use of an opt-out radio button or checkbox on a prior page. The example provided by darkpatterns.org shows how GoDaddy do this with there “privacy protection”, that you have to take out of the basket if you don’t want it.

Trick Questions

While filling in a form you respond to a question that tricks you into giving an answer you didn’t intend. When glanced upon quickly the question appears to ask one thing, but when read carefully it asks another thing entirely.

SMART act

Across the pond, Sen. Josh Hawley recently sponsored a new bill, Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology Act (SMART), which aims to ban certain design patterns on social media platforms; infinite scrolling, autoplay, gamification, etc. The main purpose of this new bill is to prevent social media companies from using such “dark design patterns” to make users addicted to their platform or product. If approved, the Federal Trade Commission and Health and Human Services could create similar rules that would expire after three years unless Congress codified them into law.

There are some very glaring problems with this mainly being it completely misses what a dark pattern actually is. Infinite scrolling can keep you scrolling for a while but it’s not a dark pattern. It can be a very useful tool. But as is often the case with politics, it is very easy to put a plaster on the problem and not actually pull the bullet out.

This might not seem like it will affect us all the way over here, but much like how GDPR means anyone who doesn’t adhere to the standards aren’t allowed to operate in Europe, we could see a situation where a app/site that uses any of the banned features is not allowed to operate in the USA. Effectively shutting out a business access to millions of potential users. Wider spread this type of policy could influence more countries to adopt similar stances and this could break a lot of apps we use everyday.

Summary

Please note that most of this will be more important for the mobile app than Actora it’s self but it’s still important to consider both. Ok so fortunately ACT don’t really have much capacity to us any of these patterns. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore them, far from it actually. It should be on all of us as individuals and as a company to make sure we strive to be user friendly. I don’t just mean making things easy to use or pretty, instead I mean we aim to be transparent with our users; about the data we collect, what it’s used for, how we collect it and to make it simple for them to cancel at any time.

I know some people will argue we want to keep users and that’s fine but even so if say a user of the mobile app has reason to leave the scheme it should not take 3 phone calls, 12 piece of paper and a hundred taps on a screen to leave. It should be very clear what will happen if they do proceed but we should not be putting up barriers to them.

There is probably something I’ve missed in terms of other patterns should avoid and I welcome comments and criticisms. If you are interested in reading more about Dark Patterns I would recommend looking at darkpatterns.org.