Dark patterns and shadow patterns
The known and unknown harms our products cause.
Researchers from Princeton university executed a study to quantify the amount of dark patterns used on the web in the context of shopping and commerce. Within a sample of 11k shopping websites it was found that 1,254 of all these websites presented some kind of dark pattern to their visitors.
A dark pattern is a design choice that coerces, steers or deceives a customer in making, potentially, harmful decisions. Some examples of harmful decisions:
- Purchasing something you are not aware of
- Paying more for an item than you thought you would’ve.
- Making a quick and sometimes rash purchase, because the sense of urgency was falsely created.
- Getting locked into a subscription or business model that is very hard to get out of.
Some of you might have been in a situation on the internet where you experienced something like this, some of you might’ve never experienced it. In some cases, you might have experienced but have never been aware of it consciously. Take a look at some examples below from the study that show dark patterns, all credits go to the researchers for finding these:
Visual interference
Sneaking of up-sell products into your shopping cart
Making it hard to cancel a membership
The most scary insight of this study? There was a correlation between the popularity of the shopping website and the prevalence of dark patterns. There are a few organisations and sources that help the industry build more awareness of these destructive actions. Take a look at the likes of https://humanetech.com/home, or the book Evil by Design by Chris Nodder. Gaining more awareness of blatantly wrong patterns to implement is an important factor in creating digital products and services that respects people time, attention and money.
Shadow patterns: scary and unknown
I think there is another factor that we ought to become aware of. I like to call it shadow patterns. The difference here: shadow patterns affect customers in the same ways, but both customers and creator are not aware of it happening. These are design decisions that seem innocent on the surface, but seem to cause damage when we dive deeper.
This is mostly due to not putting in enough effort to validate and research the impact of your decisions. It’s simply not enough to take a peek at your dashboard and validate the new functionality added value to your 3rd most important KPI. Every time you release something, it is your responsibility to make sure that everything and everyone in the chain is served to their best interest. Unless you simply don’t care.
Another risk when developing a product or service is the subtle ignorance of the wrongness of your models. No persona, no mental model, no customer journey will ever frame reality in the complete and right way. As long as we are aware of being always a few steps behind reality with our models, we can make sure that we put in the effort to set right what our design decisions might disturb. The damaging part comes when the bigger part of a team thinks the persona on the wall is an accurate reflection of your actual customer.
In both cases it is about awareness, and it’s about being humble. Be aware that you are only capable of making decisions based on knowledge that resembles reality to some extent, you do not have the knowledge of reality itself. Your decisions therefore will have implications that go beyond what you can imagine upfront.
Are you focusing on taking deliberate effort to serve everyones best interest? Are you willing to put in energy so that everyones time spent, is well spent time?
Thanks a lot for reading and please share your thoughts on dark patterns & shadow patterns.
