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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 be

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.

jjj123 3y ago
> But a big problem is that dark patterns drive measurable benefits but are associated with unmeasurable costs. Beautifully put, thank you!
ProxCoques 3y ago
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.
- handy2000 3y ago
  > 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.
  - ProxCoques 3y ago
    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.
esafak 3y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

jjj123 3y ago

> But a big problem is that dark patterns drive measurable benefits but are associated with unmeasurable costs. Beautifully put, thank you!

ProxCoques 3y ago

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.

handy2000 3y ago
> 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.
- ProxCoques 3y ago
  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.

esafak 3y ago

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy