Dark patterns and nosy businesses

What do you do if someone asks for your address without giving a reason? What if you don’t know that person, or it’s not a person, just an organisation?

Do you recognize it as a normal question or slightly intrusive?

I’m in the second team. I think I want to know why a certain individual want to know where I live. Sometimes in a friendly setting I just mention the area, there’s no need to go into details right? But quite often especially in an online booking process, they are asking about the full address. Why?

For me it’s dodgy and I wonder how many people share this opinion.

Probably not too many as it’s not unusual to come across an online form where this question comes up with no clear reason and the answer is mandatory otherwise you’re not able to progress.

I feel as it sadly becomes a standard. Like all data extorsion techniques.

I’m not talking about the address for parcel delivery- this is an obvious reason. I’m telling about the process of buying e-tickets. Everything is happening online, why we need to disclose our physical location?

Tell me why

If I’m asked about the detail which is not obvious for the service I’m trying to get, I expect to be informed what it is for. Unfortunately, this sign of good manners seems to disappear as the channel shift from physical to digital happens. In cases like that, I just abandon the checkout process and I hope I’m not the only one. I hope that online businesses will soon understand that gathering too much data is a disadvantage for the business.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it would be an optional question which I can answer or just skip but recently twice I faced the situation when I couldn’t progress without filling these fields in.

I was booking my e-ticket for a talk and there was no way to skip the step

Someone may say it’s the billing address. But if it was it should be stated and… well, who checks that, really? As we can read in the Telegraph article, it’s not always a real thing, more like an equivalent of a dummy CCTV.

I’m not a person who takes offence straight away. I’ve read their privacy policy and have found nothing that would explain why for the e-ticket they are asking for my address.

There may be many reasons. I started listing them but deleted as it doesn’t matter. As soon as they are asking for such sensitive data and there’s no obvious context, the explanation for such a question should be standard practice.

The sleep of reason produces monsters

Why companies got so used to asking invasive questions with no serious thought? And why people have nothing against it? Quite often I’m one of just a few who are paying attention to this kind of details.

I know all these shrugs when I talk about badly designed online forms. We all know and I’ve heard it many times from people that online forms are one of the most neglected elements of our digital world. We know it but few do something about it.

Do something about it

I tend to react in such cases. Therefore, as soon as I came across the mentioned checkout form, I pointed out to the company that it’s not the best practice to ask for the address with no sensible reason, it’s actually the opposite. It occurred that it was a first day of a new booking system…

I can tell after my first impression it wasn’t the improvement (as previously they used Eventbrite). The new system doesn’t follow good practices and because of its layout causes unpleasant user experience to phrase it nicely.

As I’m a UX designer specialised in online forms and a person of action, who don’t like moaning without having a constructive idea on how to fix things, I offered my help. For free.

I’ve never heard from them…

But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be trying to protest against such practices. If more people will start asking questions we can either find out the reason (if there is any) or they’ll scrap that question from the form and we’ll have fewer steps to complete it.

Thanks for reading my 24th story from My 52 problems series, which is a part of #write52 initiative.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to write here or on Twitter.

In March I will probably give a talk about designing online forms so keep an eye on my feed… (I’m stressed already!)