Reflection point: What are Dark Patterns?
This write up is part of my assignment for UX Academy by Designlab. Here I try to share my understanding on Dark Patterns.
Once, I invited everyone in my phone contacts to join my social network without even realising. When I found out about it after few weeks, it made me sad and embarrassing too. I am sure we all have gone through similar experiences where we were deceived, manipulated, tricked or sometimes even forced to do certain actions that otherwise we would not have done.
Did I miss to check (or uncheck) the tiniest and the barely visible of the checkboxes on the page? Or Was I even presented with a choice? or Did they misdirected, forced or hid the options? I now know that I was the victim of a deliberate and mean design tactic called dark patterns.
Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn’t mean to. These patterns take the principles of good UX and UI design, and turn them on their head. Some times the colour theory is manipulated to misdirect us or wording is twisted to confuse us rather than make it clear or the steps to complete a task are long and exhaustive to make us fall into a trap of taking unnecessary decisions and the user is exploited to boost company reach or profits.
In the pre-internet era, designers used human psychology to help people with problem-solving and innovative designs. Sadly, in todays world some companies & their designers are abusing the psychology to make money.
So, how does it work? When we use the web, we don’t read every word on every page — we skim read and make assumptions. This is what some companies used to their advantage. They can trick us in doing something by making a page look like it is saying one thing when it is in fact saying another. Dark patterns are very subtle and very deceptive in design as they are intented to trick unsuspecting users.
One designer has taken it very seriously by documenting these unethical practices on his website www.darkpattern.org and has even a dedicated Hall Of Shame page to expose them via the twitter feed.
Types of Dark Patterns
Misdirection —
The design purposefully focuses your attention on one thing in order to distract your attention from another.
Below is a good example of misdirection from ZSL London Zoo by blogger Paul Randall.
In the screenshot above you can see how the ‘add to basket with donation’ green button appears to suggest moving forward to the next stage of the checkout. The colourless ‘without donation’ button points backward, leaving us to assume this is some sort of back arrow to return to a previous page.
A more ethical way of doing this is make is clearer and educate people openly about the need for the donation. A short-term money making trick obstructs a longterm trust and brand reputation.
Forced Continuity —
When your free trial with a service comes to an end and your credit card silently starts getting charged without any warning. You are then given no easy way to cancel the automatic renewal. This has become quite common today where the victims of this trickery have a difficult time cancelling the subscriptions and losing money.
Timely reminders to end the free trial goes a long way in acquiring user trust. The transparency and the opportunity to make their own decision is greatly appreciated.
Conclusion
Darkpatterns.org has enlisted 11 different types of dark patterns that are common today. That means as users, we should be vigilant to ensure that we retain the capacity to challenge and be challenged. As designers and developers, we must seek to develop experiences that respect users as people with agency, boundaries, and human dignity, and don’t just treat them as a vessel for clicks.
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