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User experience design, or UX, is often praised for its ability to create intuitive and user-friendly interfaces. The whole field is about crafting digital experiences that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also efficient and enjoyable for the end users. It is about making sense of the digital realm and helping people interact with it. If done right it unlocks what would otherwise be inaccessible for some users and works as a stabilizing and democratizing force for good.
However, in the relentless pursuit of clicks, conversions, and profit, some companies have weaponized UX principles, twisting them into a manipulative tool known as dark patterns.
So, what are dark patterns?
To be able to get to grips with dark patterns let’s first have a quick look at their good and helpful siblings. Normally, UX patterns are meant to create structure and order in our day to day lives, they are design elements, principles that we can reuse or tweak to make new designs and new products but have them remain coherent and logical in-between different solutions. Ever thought about why the web or most applications look and work in a similar way? Most of us haven’t but luckily most UX designers have, and the result is often both logical and beautiful and without the need for us to read long and complex manuals. Dark patterns, on the other hand, are deceptive design elements that are intentionally crafted to trick or nudge users into making bad choices or leave us frustrated and stranded. These patterns work against the end user and only benefit the companies or organizations using them. And this practice often comes at the expense of the end user, who pays dearly with both their time, money and frustration. These patterns exploit our cognitive biases and ingrained online behavior, making it difficult to resist their persuasive power and leave us alone and lonely.
Most companies don’t use them, and stay firmly on the light side, while others deploy dark patterns for a variety of reasons.
Chiefly among these is boosting online conversions. It is often easy, almost too easy, to sign up for something or make an initial purchase. This leaves us with more junk in our drawers, endless newsletters and more subscriptions to things than any human could possibly have time or use for.
When we get caught up in these dark patterns, we often neglect to see the red flags until it is too late. We are trapped. And getting out of these deals are often hard, next to impossible.
Have you ever thought about why you can easily sign up for something, like a streaming service, directly from the app in your smartphone but you need to use a browser to be able to cancel it? Well, dark patterns are to blame. Often you have to go to another site as well, making it frustrating to remember your password, that you might have saved in your browser, but not for that domain. Why would any company want to frustrate you? Would it not be simpler to make this process simple and easy? Well, in the best of worlds that would be true. But there is a lot of money to be made if you just give up and deal with the hassle next month. Sometimes these cancellations also deploy other patterns to make your life even harder. Why not move the next and previous, confirm or cancellation buttons in-between pages making the cancellation pages into a maze where you get rerouted between the same forms over and over again. This is done to drain your life force in an effort to tire you out and forcing you to remain as a customer, a disgruntled one, but a customer, nevertheless.
Once you have completed the gauntlet and are almost done, they still have some more dirty tricks up their sleeves. When you’re almost out, just like in the Godfather part III, they pull you back in with an offer you can’t refuse. More times than not you get a special offer just as you’re about to cancel that is just too good to pass up on. And, three months later you’re still subscribed. In a sense, some companies and services are just like the mafia. If they fail to entice you with promises and free gift cards, they still have another weapon in their arsenal, guilt and fear of missing out. This particularly evil tactic is known as confirm-shaming and is designed to use guilt or fear to pressure users into unwanted actions. Imagine a pop-up warning that tells you that cancelling a free trial will result in you losing valuable progress or the fact that people who leave the services have a higher risk of gaining diabetes. Think of all the puppies that could have been saved if you just remained a customer. Why don’t you like puppies? Click here to cancel and agree that you are a bad person.
But dark patterns are not just for tricking us into remaining loyal and stop us from changing streaming services, they can be deployed to every aspect of our online environment.
Companies might advertise a seemingly low price but bury additional fees and charges in the fine print, only revealing it at the checkout stage or even after it. This is common but much more regulated by different government agencies, so the companies have to be sneaky.
And while at it, why don’t sneak something extra into our shopping basket? By deploying pre-checked boxes during checkout, they can inadvertently add unwanted items to your shopping cart, forcing you to take extra steps to remove them. Steps that for some reason often are hard and frustrating to take, almost as they intended it to be.
We also have the old classic, the bait and switch. An old trick, maybe even the oldest one in the book. By luring users with attractive offers that ultimately turn out to be misleading or unavailable, just as you we’re about to complete your purchase, pushing you towards more expensive options that just so happened to still be in stock.
But all dark patterns are not about fooling us to give up our hard-earned cash. Some, if not most of them, are there to make us pay with another currency. Our precious private data.
Deceptive forms or confusing privacy settings can, and will, trick users into surrendering more personal data than they intended, so called privacy zuckering. And lastly, we have the whole genre of techniques used to extend user engagement. With nifty features like infinite scrolling or gamification you can easily keep users glued to a platform for longer, increasing ad exposure and overall engagement. The Hotel California trap! You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. Now that I have bored you with the existence of these evil spawns of UX designs, what can be done about them? Well, fortunately, there’s a growing awareness of dark patterns and their negative impact, and steps are being taken to combat them. Several countries are implementing regulations that aim to curb the use of deceptive design practices. And a growing number of articles is trying to raise awareness and empower users to recognize and resist their manipulative tactics. All is not lost if we band together.
UX design, after all, has the potential to be a powerful force for good. By prioritizing user needs, transparency and ethical practices, UX designers can create digital experiences that are not just efficient but also empowering and trustworthy.
The fight against dark patterns is an ongoing battle. As technology evolves, so too will the tactics used to manipulate user behavior. However, by staying informed, advocating for ethical practices and demanding transparency from companies, we can ensure that UX design remains a force for good, shaping a digital landscape that prioritizes user well-being and empowers informed decision-making.
