How to Know If Your Design is Deceptive

Most designers agree that bait-and-switch ads are deceptive. But what about pre-selected checkboxes? Countdown checkout clocks? Confirm shaming?

Designers we surveyed agreed that these newer methods are, in fact, dark patterns. Officially, dark patterns are the deceptive user-interface designs that lead users to make uninformed or unintended decisions. Dark patterns have evolved with tech advancements and regulations. Today, many appear semi-dark. While this term might seem like an improvement, it’s not. Instead, the influx of gray areas are a sign that it’s harder for both users and designers to identify.

“Dark patterns have evolved to be less extreme and, therefore, less visible. Now it’s a gray area between a normal, good design and a complete fraud, fake design.” — Gena Drahun, a Salesforce Senior Experience Architect in Amsterdam

So is it a push to increase customer activity or is it manipulative design? Drahun encourages designers to consider the expectations of average users and what these users consider a fair exchange. Bending either of these can veer dark quickly.

“No matter how inconsequential, if people can’t do it without the knowledge required to do it, it’s dark.” Cliff Seal, a Salesforce Principal Designer in Atlanta

This could be anything from omitting an unsubscribe process to omitting when chatbot agents can see text. Seal explains, “Companies who do this and prioritize business goals over informed choices are taking advantage of user naiveté around important concepts of privacy and security.”

Today, there are consequences for these misleading experiences. This is especially true in account management, purchase and personal data.

The first U.S. consumer-data protection law went into effect in 2020. According to the California Consumer Privacy Act, businesses will be fined if they omit how data is used. The same goes for businesses that prevent users from keeping their data confidential.

This ups the ante for designers to avoid nefarious UX patterns. Here’s how.

5 Ways to Know If Your Design is Deceptive

1. Does it create a false sense of urgency?

We’ve all been there. Are there really five other people looking at this hotel room or is it just a randomly generated number in the code? Playing into psychological tricks — such as a feeling of scarcity — can manipulate users. It’s not an ethical way to earn a purchase. The same is true of limited-time offers that are actually year round. Or even countdown clocks falsely warning that an item might sell out.

Think of the new pop-ups to accept cookies on websites. As digital properties get user consent to collect and sell their information, new dark patterns emerge. Many platforms are displaying complicated and ill-designed matrixes of checkboxes to create urgency. When users face this decision, they are being asked to weigh trade-offs of time versus knowledge.

“Once every site has to get your permission to accept cookies and personalize an experience, many will prey on a lack of information to make a quick decision that feels like the right thing,” predicts Seal. “As consent gets harder to get from people and to document, more dark patterns will follow how we use technology to get legal consents.”

As an alternative:

Attract customers to your product by educating them about features. For example: Instead of pretending others are looking at the hotel, why not add a module of user-uploaded photos to compel them with amenities? As a senior product designer at Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco, Tracy Potter found herself considering these types of alternatives. When she and her project team saw the potential for a dark pattern, they redirected. They chose to make the product more valuable and easy to understand instead of making the offer more urgent with fewer exits. This experience has made her even more eager to see Ethics by Design adopted. It formalizes ways to incorporate ethical principles into the process of designing, building, and selling. She thinks of it akin to QA cycles in engineering.

2. Is it harder to unsubscribe than it is to subscribe?

Look no further than your online fitness center. Many fitness centers allow free trials through easy online registration.Yet, subscriptions are auto-extended and canceled only by calling during work hours. Taking a user on different paths for similar actions is confusing. So is hiding buttons that don’t benefit the business or burying unsubscribe in sub navigations. In the end, extra steps create unnecessary user friction. As we’ve seen across industries, that kind of repeated friction can also diminish reputation.

This path may seem like a way to keep customers onboard but it can eventually lead to spending more time and resources on updating the customer journey. Fixing deactivation flows has an impact on many departments. Most importantly, these types of course corrections can be avoided with the right upfront conversations.

As an alternative:

Prioritize the user and the efficiency of every action. Salesforce design architect Aran Rhee encourages designers to assess their work based on the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework. The viral concept has been championed by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen since 2005. “Think about a feature not in terms of ‘here’s something I’m shipping’ but as ‘what did this human hire us to do?’” says Rhee, who reinforces that designers have power in what they put out into the world.

3. Does it confirm-shame?

A seasonal promo gives you two choices: “Get 15% off” or “I’m not into saving money.” You try to unsubscribe and you’re shown a picture of puppies asking if you’re sure. Using shame as a tool to get customers to take (or not take) an action has, unfortunately, become quite common. The truth is: Users can make decisions whether businesses benefit from them or not. Rhee notes, “It’s preying on people’s desire to be a nice person and do the right thing. It’s not cute or fun. It’s passive-aggressive to guilt users into something.” He also notes how the tables can be turned.

Now, consumers can shame companies for shaming. ”More than ever before, CEOs are having to answer to disgruntled consumers in public forums,” he shares. Case in point: Darkpatterns.org, the website that documents who’s doing what and where.

As an alternative:

Change this dark pattern by changing the copy. Evaluate what’s written on the page for ethics and not just brand personality. A productive first step is to set up a meeting with the marketing, design and technology-ethics teams. If you don’t have an in-house ethics department (or if you’re eager to learn more), there are resources. Turn to the “Understand the Ethical Use of Technology” module on our learning platform, Trailhead.

4. Does it rely on confusion, intimidation or omission?

There’s a difference between “No thanks” and “Accept the risks” when presented with a malware pop-up. One respects your choice and the other is an implied threat. The same is true for the standard “Accept terms and conditions” and “Agree to all.” All what? Even worse, many of these generalized buttons perform multiple invisible actions. It may seem small but this practice has led to lawsuits. By omitting context, customers misunderstand what’s happening. When an agreement is clear, so are expectations. Language is critical and so is design placement.

As an alternative:

Set up user validation testing. Without this checkpoint, dark designs can go to market accidentally. Ask users what they think will happen before and after every action. This is a way to qualitatively and quantitatively find “the expectations of average users.”

5. Are the decisions irreversible?

Designers who are familiar with the 10 Usability Heuristics know to build in emergency exits. These heuristics are the rules of thumb for user interface design. In it, easy exits fall under “User Control and Freedom.” The gist is: When users go the wrong way, they expect to be able to turn around and get out. Seal explains, “Often, you’re taking an action based on having just enough information to guess at what will happen, but you’re not aware that the action might be very hard or impossible to undo.” He underscores that deaf or blind users find themselves cornered into irreversible actions due to dark patterns. “There should always be mechanisms for ‘I didn’t realize and I need to walk that back,’” he says.

This is especially important for the new cookie consent. If a user pushed Accept All in a rush, their data can be sold and resold quickly. While they can stop future use, they cannot reverse what’s already been released. Knowing this, designs need to message the gravity of these actions and create avenues to retract permissions.

As an alternative:

Follow Accessibility Standards. “Doing that will prevent you from having spaces in an experience which — intentionally or unintentionally — create dark patterns. It’s hard to mislead someone this way because everything has to be visible to the computer,” says Seal. (For more on designing for accessibility, read the Medium post by our Director of Product Accessibility, Jesse Hauler.)

Let’s remember: These ethical concerns aren’t victimless. Designers are responsible to the users and those users have real lives. For example, if a deactivation flow is well hidden on a social media platform that can have real-world problems. This is particularly true if someone is getting harassed online. Potter elaborates, “As a designer, you might not think about the possibility for a design to hurt someone, but it can map to physical places in the world and could have an impact on someone’s real life.”

Given what’s at stake, designers can avoid dark patterns by asking themselves the five questions laid out here.

If the answer is yes (or kind of), then try the alternative. When in doubt, Rhee recommends shifting the internal conversation to how to solve the right problem in the right way. Note: It’s not necessarily the easiest way. Leave behind psychological levers such as scarcity, shame or intimidation. Instead, lean on proven design best practices, like Consequence Scanning and Relationship Design.

Ready for more? Learn how Salesforce thinks about Ethical & Humane Use as we create technology that not only drives the success of our customers but also upholds the basic human rights of every individual.

Many thanks to the team who brought this piece to life, including: Kate Hughes, Noelle Moreno, Aran Rhee, Tracy Potter, Cliff Seal, Gena Drahun and Denise Burchell.

Learn more about Salesforce Design at www.salesforce.com/design.

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