This article shouldn't be addressed to designers, it should be addressed to product managers, or to leadership who sets OKRs. The issue is not designers not knowing this is wrong, or being able to think of alternatives. The issue is not that the designer, on their own initiative, decides to make a user-hostile product. The issue is that product teams are being strongly incentivized or even directly ordered to implement dark patterns like this. If it was just the designer calling for the use of dark patterns, and everybody else in the organization was against it, it wouldn't happen. Likewise, if the designer is the only one in the organization who advises against it, guess what? It's happening anyway.
> Dark patterns are not present in user experiences by mistake. They are carefully crafted to appear during a certain moment of the user interaction process.
Despite this, there's a section named How to Avoid Dark Patterns in UX Design. This section doesn't really deliver on its title, as of course the real answer is that you simply don't adopt dark patterns.
Most of the article is a tour of the most common dark patterns. The 10 Dark Patterns in UX Design part is fine, but the and How to Avoid Them part doesn't make much sense.
It's really not about aggressive goals. OKRs are always tied to a single metric (in some cases secondary metrics exist, too). So if no one on the team has a strong ethical compass, the way that goal is reached is not a concern, the only thing that matters is reaching that goal. At every step the participating roles would bump the responsibility to think about the ethics of the proposed solution to the next role in the process. So at the end, no one cares or speaks up because the ethics are not embedded in any process, and are not included in OKRs.
I think dark patterns mostly work against the long-term interests of the companies that deploy them. But a big problem is that dark patterns drive measurable benefits but are associated with unmeasurable costs. So metrics-driven teams can end up deploying them to the long-term detriment of the company itself. Management needs to ensure that teams are not sacrificing intangible soft capital in order to meet measurable goals.
For example, a dark pattern might increase subscription conversion rate, time spent on a page, and so on -- which can be directly measured and appear in OKRs -- but may also result in people developing negative associations with your brand and gradually avoiding visiting your site in the first place, when they see it in a linked URL.
Think of a website that is relatively free of dark patterns -- maybe McMaster-Carr or something -- and notice how often you might find yourself looking there first. That's good-will, a valuable but ephemeral resource which is be very hard for a company to quantify, and therefore easy and tempting to spend down in pursuit of short-term gains.
I'm a UX designer who has worked at large online brands for the last 15 years and I completely agree with this. For all the millions companies spend on "analytics", they have no ability to measure the effect of any given design intervention over anything more than the duration of a test. So they don't care - because they can't.
As a designer, you have to accept that. If a design you know customers hate has shown a positive effect for the business (and no, they don't re-test these things - it's first past the post my friends), then that design is there to stay. You can try your best to persuade everyone otherwise, but only the law courts can save you.
This, along with the usually quite early realisation that the people you work for couldn't tell a good design if it exploded in their custard, is probably about the worst thing about working as a designer in a commercial context. Just about.
> they have no ability to measure the effect of any given design intervention over anything more than the duration of a test
It's actually pretty common to have a holdout group that's basically a long term control group for a series of experiments. This way companies are able to measure long-term impacts, including negative ones.
Are we talking about the same thing? Not only have I never encountered any business back-testing experiments in any way, but purposefully running "losing" variants on a percentage of traffic would be anathema.
That's the quantitative fallacy: that which can't be measured easily doesn't matter.
To be clear, long term effects can be measured, but they typically aren't because it's more complicated, expensive, and capable of disproving hypotheses, blocking promotions.
LinkedIn deserves an entire article to list their each and every dark pattern.
Some of the few that come to my mind:
- Asking you to install app when browsing from mobile (which goes away when you use "Desktop Mode").
- Saying that you have a message in your inbox but not the very message itself.
BTW, Do we have an open source alternative to LinkedIn like there is Mastodon to Twitter? :(
Another teeth-biting favorite is Adobe's "free" online tools (like PDF pages splitter etc.) where you will be able to do everything and once you click "Download", Adobe asks you to create an account to continue. :/
just tried Booking.com the other day and seems like... most of those have gone away? Or maybe they're gone in Australia b/c of the consumer protection laws here?
It's the e-commerce equivalent of putting the finger on the scale. Maybe there should be some laws against it but can you imagine politicians understanding any of this? Every undo action such as un-subscribing should be equally as easy as the original action.
Politicians understand this very well, in the sense that every time there’s wind of pro-consumer regulations, companies are happy to spoil the politician in money and benefits if he stands against said regulation.
> Companies can find several reasons to avoid dark patterns. By following best design practices, they can build a positive brand image, maintain customer trust, and adhere to legal and ethical standards.
I don't think Amazon Prime or New York Times making it hard to cancel subscriptions is putting a dent in their brand image. Big companies can and will get away with it.
> I don't think Amazon Prime or New York Times making it hard to cancel subscriptions is putting a dent in their brand image. Big companies can and will get away with it.
People should complain more and there should be more outrage. This is one of very effective way to keep the big companies in line. We are in a society that discourages complaining even if it is completely justified.
I'm a paying subscriber to NYT but if I click a link when I'm not logged in, this is what I get:
A screen that tries to offer me an introductory rate with a big subscribe now button and a small log in link. When I click log in,
A username form only - ie. no password form until I've submitted my username, which means I need to invoke my password manager twice. Then before I see the original article
A fullscreen modal wanting me to upgrade my subscription to get "All of the times" which includes News, Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and the Athletic (no pricing info), just a big Upgrade Now button or a small "continue without upgrading" link
This is such an annoying pattern that was adopted by almost all websites. It almost always breaks password managers (requiring 2 invocations). I guess it "helps" people who can't differentiate between "log in" and "sign up"... at the cost of annoying everyone else.
I read about Prime being hard to cancel several times now. It's not harder than any other membership. It feels weird defending Amazon, but just go to your Account, you will see a large card right at the top saying Prime. Click that, on the next screen, again, right at the top it says "Membership. Update, cancel, and more". Click that and it will open a large popup with the End membership button.
Yes, it's true, that on the next screen it will tell you how much you saved using Prime and will offer to look at other plans or to continue cancelling. So this screen is sort of a dark pattern, I guess. Even then, privacy-oriented companies like Proton show a similar upsell screen on cancellation.
Overall Prime cancellation is very straightforward, compared to scummy companies that require you to email or call them to cancel membership. Unless the (unreasonable) expectation is that the CANCEL PRIME button should be front and center on every page on amazon.com. And clicking it should immediately cancel the membership without any confirmation.
Edit: the shaming element of the cancellation process was removed by Amazon long time ago.
Kudos to the author for actually pointing these out. A lot of those are the patterns that everyone got used to: they can be seen universally across the Internet, and some have been used for so long that it is probable that many users (and developers, and designers) don't even realize they are the dark patterns. Some are of course used intentionally, but I would guess some of the new web sites and web apps use them "just because everyone else does it".
Unfortunately for us, there is no easy solution, though. I think that the suggested solutions are too lightweight to be convincing, although I agree with the general idea: do your research, get the real competitive advantage. But this is easier said than done, while the dark patterns are easier to use. Like the Dark Force. Not sure the Force wins in real life eventually, but I surely hope so.
I had a lovely one the other day when trying to contact FreshWorks support. I just want to cancel an account but as far as I can tell they’ve sunset the service so I’m forced to go through the support process.
I couldn’t even submit the form without ticking the following:
> I would like to receive marketing communications related to Freshworks' business, services, and events. I can unsubscribe from these communications at any time.
The only email I’ve received since has been a fake real sales email with no unsubscribe link.
I was doing some contract work with an ad agency, client was Cisco, and part of the site was a ‘sign up for this thing’ page - and of course they wanted the ‘subscribe to promotional emails’ box checked by default when the form was presented to the user.
And I was like - nobody actually likes that though. Nobody likes that, people resent it, it’s basically a way to trick people into giving you permission to send them spam.
Everyone kind of laughed and agreed, but the account supe was like “yeah, but it’s what the client wants, so”
Tech lead was walking past my desk on his way out at the end of the day, and he was like, “the thing about the subscription box? Let’s just ‘forget’ to do it and see if anybody notices.”
Seemed like a good thing to do, so we did - but it came back as a QA ticket, and we deprioritized it, until finally the account guy swung by my desk and was like, “I know we don’t like the checkbox thing, but we do actually need to do it.”
And I was like alright fine I’ll do the checkbox thing
I don't even bother raising it as a problem these days. More effective is to implement it exactly as specified so the designer is happy and the the managers are happy and the client is happy.
Then a month or so later, "accidentally" introduce a regression. Oops, the checkbox isn't checked by default any more! Nobody is thinking about it by then, nobody is checking it, and nobody will notice.
I had success in the past hampering the process by linking to various legislations (e.g. GDPR, CCPA) and asking my PM to reach out to legal to approve the implementation. At larger companies legal is usually pretty cautious and takes a very long time to respond.
These are tame compared to some of the stuff I have been tasked with at a previous company. I don't want to go into specifics really, but I can tell you that it sort of became normal. Should we test out defaulting the newsletter checkbox? Sure, oh great, it improved newsletter conversions! Should we show a fake "X amount of people viewed this product"? Sure, if it works we can actually implement it! Etc. etc.
Until I was outside of the culture of the company for a bit, I didn't see any issue. Improvement of metrics was all that mattered.
It feels to me like the author compiled a list of 10 things that annoyed them the week prior, gave each of them an important sounding name and made an article of it.
Not that I support any of these patterns, but there’s a reason companies do them. Just telling someone to not do them will not stop companies from doing them.
Yes modern UX (or what we just call 'UX') is based on dark patterns and psychological manipulation. Even something as innocent as gamification is manipulation exploiting same thing as gambling. So yes there is reason companies doing them: trapping user.
Honestly I think this content is a bit educational for us techies, but yes, it’s mostly just “business as usual” these days.
However, if this type of content was aimed towards grandmas, boomers, etc it could have a huge positive effect. The people most susceptible to dark patterns are those who don’t know better.
As I’ve written in another comment, my mom has needed help to make “her computer work again” after Microsoft has changed her default browser to edge. It happens (seemingly) on every meaningless update.
No excuse for this other than them refusing to understand.
Which is why, when companies try to apply dark patterns to you, you should bug the fuck out of their support channel.
Slack changed the design again to push features you never use? Ask support how to get the old design back. Be incessant. Act like it's the most sensible possible request and they are just not getting it.
The premise of this article makes no sense to me. It's suggesting that one needs to actively expend effort to avoid "accidentally" implementing dark patterns. You could just...not build them. If I click yes, I mean yes, if I click no, I mean no--it's more complex for developers and designers alike to add friction to that flow.
My guess is that the author chose to approach this in a softer way, without shaming the designers. He is leaning into education without assuming bad intent.
Not going to lie, this might be more effective than shaming designers.
You can accidentally lull yourself into thinking a particular pattern is not so bad when everyone does it and growth hackers recommend it with a straight face. Calling them out removes [any potential] ambiguity.
I actually wouldn’t be too sure about that. Some dark patterns have become so ubiquitous that a new developer might just think that that’s the way to implement certain features.
some of them look like someone just didn't think it all the way through, for example the nextdoor email unsubscribe switch would have been clear had it been a checkbox or with clearer wording, but only in combination it is unclear.
Funny that this website has the ever-annoying scroll indicator. Why don't web designers understand we already have a scroll indicator? It's called the scroll bar. There is literally no function for these things.
Had the scroll indicator in the heading excluded the massive footer might have offered something of value, but with this lazy implementation ist shows that you haven't finished the article even though you have and only completes when you scroll through the giant footer.
Sadly, it is not that simple. E.g. if your boss wants to see the numbers, and the dark pattern performs better. Just yesterday we discussed how the 'business' trumps the 'user': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483181
Sometimes, measuring long-term effects might be an option, but that might also not help. I am still in favor of fighting for a good UX, but you should not categorize everybody as a horrible person who builds such crap (even though I want to too) ;-)
If a newsletter subscription really has a "don't not opt in" checkbox, I can't imagine how horribly worded and confusing the actual crappy freaking newsletter must be.
It needs a new name. It's not a Dark Pattern if so many firms are employing it successfully for profit.
Obviously the community isn't self policing. Cartels do a better job down in Mexico overall in my opinion. Rather it's clear the incentive in this sector in particular (new tech / apps) only leads to further development and twisting and bending into it becoming normalized somewhat or somehow.
See also: the success of microtransactions and who made money on them
Aside: I absolutely adore the design of this website. I’ve tried to do something like it in my personal projects, but I’m not a designer and it always comes out as the wish.com version. Props and respect.
Serious: I think this actually highlights the importance of ethics as a field of study for everyone going into computing/software/information work professionally.
I don’t think any of us want to live in a world where our computers are lying, tricking, deceiving, fooling, shaming, or manipulating us. Yet so many of us ignore the ethical implications of our work to make a quick buck.
It is clear as day to me that these things are wrong. It wasn’t always like that. In college I thought the idea of teaching ethics was stupid, and we should do whatever we can to fuck people over (I wouldn’t have used those terms). I don’t know why I grew out of that, but I did, and I think the world might be better off if the people who knew better intervened earlier in people’s careers.
This is your sign to reflect on how many times you have been an enemy to your fellow man through your work (and if your work scales, an enemy to thousands to billions of people), and start your job search if that number bothers you.
"How to get fired from an unethical employer because you didn't create the manipulative designs they expected" and/or "how to surface whether your employer is garbage and you should start looking for a better place to work". :)
