How dark pattern manipulate our life in the digital world
How are the issue that pertain to knowledge and power in digital cultures by specific tools and practices that emerged or intensified in 21st century?
As the reflection from the course Digital Cultures, the existence of advanced technology is debating with both sides. The answer and example of this question have drawn a parallel with the development of technology since the trend of economy emphasis how important that digitalisation would enhance our society.
Today, we live in this mainstream of Big Data, and the internet builds the platform for us to know about the new world, people rely on it to buy commodities and contact with each other. Followed by this trend, the information explosion is not a new thing, which implied that now audience may not pay all attention to every information that people had seemed.
As a result, it is an obvious and common thing in our daily life when we searched for one thing before, and the relative advertisement pops up on our social platform. Those facts reveal that our personal information had exported to three parties when we signed for the web and unconsciously agree to share our privacy to stakeholders.
However, from the business perspective, industry emphasises the digital supply chain to provide a customer-centric journey, due to the influence of purchase behaviour from Millennial and Generation Z. People willing to pay more to buy a better experience, and it stimulates the industry to tend to the customer-controlled retailing, and provide more experiential shopping process. Since the industry considers the engagement when people experience the service, how to design those process which has both hedonic and utilitarian values would be the crucial steps for the design team, and also to consider the business benefit into their design.
As several studies and news reveal that because enterprises devote themselves to provide an innovative system for the user to enjoy the seamless user experience, they require user’s privacy to collect audience’s preference to achieve the customer satisfaction. However, according to the report from The Norwegian Consumer Council, they considered that those change of trend is not the excuse when enterprises exploit user’s privacy by designing the “dark pattern”.
Dark pattern, coined by the Brignull in 2010, it describes the user interface that is designed carefully to trick the user into doing something they might not otherwise do. On the other hand, the dark pattern has been defined when designers use their knowledge of human behaviour such as psychology and the end user’s desire to implement the deceptive functionality which would not be the user’s interest [1].
As the introduction from the video above, we may find that we have a similar experience when we found our search history became the advertisement and popped up on our social platform. This system seems like the maze trick, enterprises design this system for the user to easier engage into it and find the treasure, and then the user would hardly find the exit to leave.
Nevertheless, this kind of design is debating for a decade in the human-computer interface (HCI) area. As the awareness of ethical design raised, prior studies acknowledged that dark pattern is shaped from persuasive design [2] when the design is inherently a persuasive act [3][4].
Hence, to answer the question about the specific tool, which is empowered to cause the digital issue in the 21st century, this essay will be based on the ethical issue in user experience (UX) area. Furthermore, holding some examples when the dark pattern is designed for the user journey secretly.
Types of Dark Pattern
For the classification of dark pattern, UX practitioner Harry Brignull in 2010 explored the existed website and to propose the 12 types of dark pattern. Subsequently, based on the definition from Brignull, Gray et al. [2] classified five main dark pattern strategies derived from Brignull’s finding.
On the other hand, the research from Mathur et al. [5] targeted on how dark pattern influenced the user’s decision making. Based on the classification, they defined the taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics. Also, the finding from Mathur et al. [5] revealed that many types of dark patterns operate by the cognitive psychology that the knowledge of UX designer. Since Xiao and Benbasat [6] found that users would be affected by the deceptive marketing practices in online shopping, and they would be influenced by the affective mechanisms such as psychological or emotional motivation and the cognitive mechanisms such as perceptions about a product.
Hence, Mathur et al. [5] proposed finding below to demonstrate the types of dark patterns and how it utilises people’s cognitive bias and the most common type of dark pattern.
As the figure demonstrated above is evident that the low-stock message is the most common type in the dark pattern, while the second type is countdown timer from urgency category. Both of those are utilised the scarcity bias to be the psychological strategies to trigger user.
The common of scarcity bias that current website utilised while Booking.com is accused that they utilise vary of scarcity to manipulate the audience to order their product [7][8][9].
Thus, the next series of article will discover the two most typical types — (i) Low-stock message and (ii) Countdown timer of dark pattern in Booking.com and to discuss both sides. In order to elaborate on these two types of dark pattern, the cases from Booking.com would be utilised to analysis. How this design connects to the business strategies and how to influence the audience from a psychological perspective would be discussed further.
Reference
[1] Greenberg, S., Boring, S., Vermeulen, J., & Dostal, J. (2014, June). Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: a critical perspective. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (pp. 523–532).
[2] Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018, April). The dark (patterns) side of UX design. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–14).
[3] Redström, J. (2006, May). Persuasive design: Fringes and foundations. In International Conference on Persuasive Technology (pp. 112–122). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
[4]Nodder, C. (2013). Evil by design: Interaction design to lead us into temptation. John Wiley & Sons.
[5] Mathur, A., Acar, G., Friedman, M. J., Lucherini, E., Mayer, J., Chetty, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–32.
[6] Xiao, B., & Benbasat, I. (2011). Product-related deception in e-commerce: a theoretical perspective. Mis Quarterly, 35(1), 169–196.
[7] Lukka, L., 2018. Only one room left!. [Blog] uxdesign, Available at: <https://uxdesign.cc/only-one-room-left-244fa7e1f434> [Accessed 25 May 2020].
[8] Cheplyaka, R., 2017. How Booking.com manipulates you. [Blog] Roman Cheplyaka, Available at: <https://ro-che.info/articles/2017-09-17-booking-com-manipulation> [Accessed 25 May 2020].
[9] Bittner, M., 2020. How Booking.com makes you book a room — a UX analysis. [Blog] uxdesign, Available at: <https://uxdesign.cc/how-booking-com-makes-you-book-a-room-a-ux-analysis-d0b5177b8b25> [Accessed 25 May 2020].
