How to avoid deceptive patterns in your designs
Exposing common patterns for more awareness
In this article, you will learn about deceptive patterns aka dark patterns, and how you can go about avoiding those in your own designs.
Let me start off with a few questions demonstrating typical use cases of deceptive patterns:
Have you ever been in a situation where you signed up for a free trial, optimistically assuming there was no catch, just to find out sometime later that your credit card was silently charged without any warning? Or have you ever purchased a membership that didn't meet your expectations, and when you wanted to cancel it you realized there was no easy way out of it? Or the moment you were ready to proceed to your online checkout and out of a sudden, you encounter a sneakily added product warranty in your basket?
Believe it or not, we all have already been tricked by misleading patterns that benefit the creator more than the user. It literally happens to everyone!
These encounters are all instances of deceptive patterns, often referred to as dark or evil patterns. Frankly, I prefer not to use the latter terms because I personally don’t think it’s right to associate something “dark” with potentially being “bad”. Therefore, I am going to use either the term deceptive or…
