Dark Patterns
In Interaction Design
UX involves having an understanding on the user's behavior and influencing it, watching them while they use an interface and reacting to that. Where's the line between influence and manipulation in design?
As with any other tools we can use interaction design honestly and deceitfully. Every heuristic and pattern has two sides, so it's up to you wether to be on the light or the dark side of the force.
What’s a dark pattern?
Dark Patterns are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.
- Harry Brignull on darkpatterns.org
Examples
These dark patterns, as well as persuasion techniques, are only useful when the victim doesn’t know about them.
If we know what we are dealing with it’s less likely that we fall for them. Here are some examples:
Sneak into basket
Suggesting related products on the checkout is fine, but adding them straight on your cart is a whole different story. Users need to remove the items them if they manage to notice them in the first place.
Roach Motel
Making it really easy to perform certain actions (sign up, buy, subscribe) and then extremely difficult to revert those actions. Making this hard can consist of burying that feature under several layers of navigation, or plainly not providing a way to do that online.
Forced Continuity
Forcing users to provide credit card information to sign up for a “free trial”. Then, after the trial period is over the user automatically starts getting billed without any notifications.
Trick questions
Asking ambiguous questions, which when glanced upon appear to ask one thing, but if read carefully, asks another thing entirely.
Can’t see the forest for the trees?
Focusing just on conversion rates and not on the customer’s feelings can cause great damage.
With the rise of the lean startup movement we feel in the need to reach high conversion rates in very short periods of time. We implement one design solution after another, everything is run on metrics, so some people might think that A/B testing has always the the final answer, however, sometimes we need to take a step back and analyze where we stand.
A conversion is only meaningful when it’s honestly achieved and actually intended by the user.
If users feel deceived they might end up hating your company and publicly complaining to let others know about it. This can cause great damage on a brand’s image and it’s not efficient in the long run. In fact, there are several persuasion techniques that can be applied effectively without causing that resent feeling in the users.
There’s no such thing as neutral user interfaces
We are always directing the user’s behavior in some way, and to work in an interdisciplinary team we should definitely let marketers do their jobs. Here are some persuasion techniques presented by Robert Cialdini on his book ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’.
Reciprocation
We want to return favors granted to us. If we feel that an app or website has done something for us, it’s more likely that we want to return that favor by donating, sharing or whatever favor is asked to us.
Commitment and consistency
We want to be consistent with our sayings. If we’ve posted on Facebook that we like a company, we’ve identified ourselves with that, so it’s more likely that we want to stick with that company on the future.
Social Proof
We enjoy doing what others do. This is a really wide-spread technique, you may have seen it as the “Popular choice” on a price comparison table. Even when it’s just in the form of default option, this technique is a huge decision facilitator, so we should use them wisely with clear wording so the user is always in control.
This principle also takes the form of activity streams and successfully engages users to interact with applications.
Liking
We tend to comply more if the requester is someone we know and like.
That’s why referrals are for: ‘Share this referral link and both you and your friend will get $5 on credit’, ‘John invites you like his page on Facebook’, ‘Peter has sent you a DropBox invite’.
As long as the user agrees on sending this communications this can be a powerful tool.
Authority
If a credible source backs it up, then we are in.
We’ve seen this every time a sites displays a security seal. Users feel safer if a well known institution has certified the site or app they are interacting with.
Scarcity
We want to act fast if the resource is limited. An honest use of this technique would be to inform about the remaining stock of a certain product on an e-commerce site. A deceitful use would be to alter that data in order to create a sense of urgency when there’s actually plenty of stock.
Expectation Management
As you can see design patterns as well as persuasion techniques can be used both for good and evil, so where’s the line between them?
In my humble opinion a balance between the interests of the users and the interests of the company can be achieved with proper expectation management. Users should always be in control and know exactly what to expect from any interaction with our site our app.
Resources such as darkpatterns.com make the Interaction Design community stronger by providing tools to spot and prevent unethical use of the powerful tools our discipline offers us.
This empowers a more balanced mindset where quantitative data is as important as qualitative data. At the end of the day credibility and trust on a company are the basics to achieve customer loyalty.
After all… if you felt cheated. Would you come back for more?
