More or less, it tells you the "cost" of removing an accidental dark pattern. For example we had three plans and a free plan. The button for the free plan was under the plans, front-and-center ... unless you had a screen/resolution that most of our non-devs/designers had.
So, the button, (for user's most common resolution) had the button just below the fold.
This was an accident though some of our users called us out for it -- suggesting we'd removed the free plan altogether.
So, we a/b tested moving the button to the top.
It would REALLY hurt the bottom line and explained some growth we'd experienced. To remove the "dark pattern" would mean laying off some people.
I think you can guess which one was chosen and still implemented.
When I left that company it had grown to massive and the product was full of dark patterns… I mean bugs, seriously, they were tracked as bugs that no one could fix without severe consequences. No one put them there on purpose. When you have hundreds of devs working on the same dozen files (onboarding/payments/etc) there are bound to be bad merges (when a git merge results in valid but incorrect code), misunderstanding of requirements, etc.
So, the button, (for user's most common resolution) had the button just below the fold.
This was an accident though some of our users called us out for it -- suggesting we'd removed the free plan altogether.
So, we a/b tested moving the button to the top.
It would REALLY hurt the bottom line and explained some growth we'd experienced. To remove the "dark pattern" would mean laying off some people.
I think you can guess which one was chosen and still implemented.