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Dark Patterns - User Interfaces Designed to Trick People
- matho 13y agoThere's a dichotomy here on HN: Best marketing practice generally praises upselling and A/B testing conversions to increase sales and profits. But, taking these to a natural conclusion typically results in exactly the Dark Patterns we see here: where users are tricked or misled into agreeing to things they might not if they were offered clear, open and full disclosure upfront. We can identify dark patterns - but in many cases, these are here because they work. At least, large international businesses such as RyanAir believe that they have a positive outcome which overwhelms any damage to the brand. I would like to know: how can we resolve these two ideas and run ethical but viable/competitive businesses?
- corresation 13y agoIs that really a dichotomy? Tricking or misleading customers may increase conversions and upselling, but you don't need to do that to achieve that goal. Instead you can offer legitimate value and information that might help a customer make such a choice.
- matho 13y agoAirlines do offer legitimate value. That doesn't stop them from adding dark patterns on top. Acting with business interests in mind, airlines are practically compelled to add dark patterns. Other airlines have moved towards RyanAir's model, not away from it. I find that frightening, as an ethical person who wants to run a business.
- corresation 13y agoRyanAir is not the dark pattern. The tricked-into-insurance aspect is. Your comment was regarding conversions and upselling (purporting it as a dichotomy to do those yet deride dark patterns), yet neither of those ever need dark patterns -- if you have a compelling pitch that makes the customer knowingly and intentionally choose the option, you have legitimate business gains.
- cortesoft 13y agoThey add them because people most often choose the cheapest flight. Lets say you have two airlines that both need to offer a flight for $300 in order to make a reasonable profit. If one shifts $15 of that cost to bag fees, then people will choose that one even though the end cost is the same. The other airlines have to follow suit or they will fail to stay competitive.
- dkarl 13y agoI would like to know: how can we resolve these two ideas and run ethical but viable/competitive businesses? There is no way to "resolve" the fact that there are always ways to make money unethically, there are always people taking advantage of them, and if you are a human being you will always feel a twinge of regret and unfairness that you can't join in the fun.
- nck4222 13y agoDark patterns confuse the user in to spending money, whether they want your product or not. A/B testing communicates the value of your product, and the customer wants to give you money.
- dragonwriter 13y agoA/B testing empirically measures the value of any technique to improve the value being optimized; if you the value you are optimizing for (based on what it is you are measuring in the A/B test) is not "effectively communicates the value of your product", but, e.g., "increases conversions", then dark patterns which optimize the value sought (increasing conversions) by "confusing the user into spending money" will be favored by A/B testing. There is nothing intrinsically favoring honest communication or opposing dark patterns about A/B testing.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> I would like to know: how can we resolve these two ideas and run ethical but viable/competitive businesses? All other things being equal, you can't. If there are dark patterns that empirically do increase competitiveness in the market of interest at the cost of violating things you hold to be ethical principles, you aren't going to be competitive without employing them unless you have some other non-duplicated market-relevant advantage that compensates for the disadvantage of ethics, unless you can change the market context to eliminate the effectiveness of the dark patterns.
- darushimo 13y agoI think you're right here, but the qualifier "all things being equal" can't be taken lightly. Rarely if never are "all things equal." I also don't think a shift in the market context is necessary. We already have a market place where people who feel tricked or duped will have a lower opinion of the company doing the duping. dark patterns have a bad edge to them too--very few of them, when noticed by the user, leave the user actually feeling good about how they were duped. This kinda reminds me of the talk PG gave at 2008 start up school titled "Be Good." (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc) He outlines many ways why it's not merely ethically appropriate to be good, but also a strategically superior approach to running a startup. Ease of use, simplicity, trustworthiness--these are important qualities of a biz's reputation, both internally and in public perception. And Dark patterns tend to harm that reputation. Edit: Addendum--obviously there are monopolies or monopoly-like situations where reputation isn't important.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> I also don't think a shift in the market context is necessary. If the dark patterns empirically work, then a market context shift is necessary. > We already have a market place where people who feel tricked or duped will have a lower opinion of the company doing the duping. dark patterns have a bad edge to them too--very few of them, when noticed by the user, leave the user actually feeling good about how they were duped. If they had enough of a "bad edge" that they didn't actually work to increase the returns realized by a business--then they wouldn't be an issue, as there'd be no incentive to use them.
- jka 13y agoOpen question: as a startup grows and matures, even if it is originally entirely designed with honest user objectives in mind, where usability and simplicity are paramount, at some point there will be calls to increase revenues - either in response to declining growth, market saturation, or simply to maintain existing growth. Is there any way to structure the incentives of a business to prevent this from happening as a business grows? Intuitively there is an argument that maintaining simplicity will improve word-of-mouth and conversion rates, but in reality it (unfortunately, perhaps) absolutely is the case that revenue can be massively increased by introducing all kinds of additional advertising, up/cross-sells, and ultimately, dark patterns.
- Chris_Newton 13y agoIntuitively there is an argument that maintaining simplicity will improve word-of-mouth and conversion rates, but in reality it (unfortunately, perhaps) absolutely is the case that revenue can be massively increased by introducing all kinds of additional advertising, up/cross-sells, and ultimately, dark patterns. I wonder how true that really is. We’ve recently been looking into advertising options for a new service, and to say that the experience we’ve had trying to arrange Facebook and Google ads has been terrible would be very kind to Facebook and Google. I reckon Facebook have lost half the money we’d have spent with them just through UI failures, up to and including literally not being able to place ads sometimes because their pages simply didn’t work. Google have to date lost 100% of the money we were considering giving to them because we couldn’t figure out what we were getting for our money within a reasonable period of time and whether it was likely to have a reasonable RoI compared to our other options. As a small business, of course we have only so much financial budget to spend across all advertising channels, but we have even less time for busy founders to figure out where to spend it. A simple “Pay this, get that” kind of deal is much more attractive than these vague, auction-based on-line advertising systems where half the numbers they report seem wildly inconsistent from one page to the next. I’m not sure whether those schemes are intended to be a dark pattern or whether they just feel like it because of their inherently vague nature and frequently appalling UI, but they seem pretty close to the line to me. Ironically, the unclear deal also makes us hesitant to use these services for our own advertising, for fear of effectively becoming unwelcome advertisers ourselves. I loathe spammers as much as anyone, and on top of that we operate in a relatively small and very social market, so not knowing whether we’re showing marketing material to people who are actually likely to be interested is a big turn-off for us. So I guess as well as being another possible example of a dark pattern, this is also an example of poor UI clearly decreasing revenues rather than increasing them.
- harrybr 13y agoHi, I'm the guy who started darkpatterns.org. It's nice to see it popping up on HN every now and then. We're actually looking for contributors to help edit and update the content. If anyone is interested, drop us a line (contact details on the site). It's intended to be a community project and we'd love to see a lot more faces and names on the about page.
- muyuu 13y agoIs it available for download outside of slideshare?
- genericacct 13y agoDo you have an entry for airlines that will subtly change the month on the return calendar so you end up having to pay for a rebooking?
- kjhughes 13y agoSee also Harry's post yesterday on The Verge, http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-inside-the-interfaces-designed-to-trick-you http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-insi... which is a nice introduction to Dark Patterns. And apparently the darkpatterns.org site has been posted to HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347543 The URLs lexically match exactly, so I'm not sure why dupe detection failed here.
- arethuza 13y agoI saw this and thought "Ryanair and the No Insurance option" - glad to see it in there as it is amazing that a company could do that...
- yeleti 13y agodoes this A/B testing border on a dark pattern? http://teslachat.tumblr.com/post/59767541777/we-hid-the-demo-button http://teslachat.tumblr.com/post/59767541777/we-hid-the-demo...
- etherealG 13y ago
- throwaway2048 13y agoA possible example of this is how the 'Clear Browsing Data' button in chrome for android has been moved to an inconspicious location away from the other settings, if you have an android device i invite you to see how easily you can find it without looking it up.
- ntoshev 13y agoFound it without hesitation. I don't see a better place to put it. It's not a setting, it's an action, related to the Privacy settings.
- Kiro 13y agoImpossible to find.
- jlgreco 13y agoMenu -> History -> Clear.
- throwaway2048 13y agoI was referring to Chrome on Android, that is not where it is.
- Dylan16807 13y agoI fail to see what would be 'dark' in the first place about making it hard to clear local browsing data on a single-user device.
- jleader 13y agoChrome is a web browser created (largely) by Google. Google makes their money (largely) from web advertising. Web advertising is far more effective if you can use things like cookies to decide what ads to show to people. So the claim is that Google has an incentive to make it harder to clear local browsing data than if they just considered it from the perspective of what users would want.
- BonoboBoner 13y agoThanks to the author for including RyanAir's awful booking reservation website. This piece of garbage is filled with traps and puzzles in order to sneak additional costs onto you. God I hate this carrier a well as the world's "cheaper is better" attitude.
- victoriap 13y agoHow does it compare to Godaddy checkout?
- dylz 13y agoGodaddy is slightly worse. Though this is a side effect of things like "government required disclosure".
- eCa 13y agoGodaddy is basically scrolldown+click correct button three times. Ryanair is trap upon trap. Radiobuttons and checkboxes all over the place, and if you forget to confirm not wanting a bag you have to start over on that page and hit all the right settings again. Multiply that five-six times... (And I wouldn't be surprised if Parsons and O'Leary are buddies.)
- JohnTHaller 13y agoBulk Register (eNom) puts bogus products in your cart when you purchase a domain like 'free' trials of cloud storage or automatic mobile website generation EVERY single time you buy or renew a domain name. If you miss the fact that they snuck it in there, they start billing you after a month. Just a crappy way to do business.
- seiji 13y agoRyan Air is the worst web presence online. It makes a great next-generatin Turing Test -- given zero information about the website (like a person just going to it for the first time), can an artificial intelligence book something on the Ryan Air website with no upsell purchases and not letting the booking process time out (which seems to be between 5 and 30 seconds for each of their 14 steps)?
- tsunamifury 13y agoOne of the most Pavlovian I've encountered is in InAppPurchases. A confirm button will be repeated in the same corner of a dialog box 9 out of 10 times, but the 10th time it will be replaced with a single-click purchase. Basically the UI Is set up to purposefully hotswap to confuse the user into accidental purchases. I've also seen purchase buttons placed extremely near edges in order to capture edge gestures and convert them into purchases. Used on several of gamelofts latest free to play games.
- dylangs1030 13y agoYep. Single click purchases shouldn't be utilized as much on mobile devices. The state of mobile apps is such that it's already not intensive to get to a checkout page where you buy something; it's not like Amazon where you might jump through 4-5 pages of confirmations and it's useful to seasoned buyers. Apps are so much smaller (comparatively) than entire websites that really you just need to tap a button from the options/main menu and then get to the selection area before payment. There's no address to put it, or shipping details that a "one-tap" could bypass and expediate. I think whoever first thought, "Let's port one-click purchases to mobile!" either was being disingenuous or was only successful because it was used in an unintended, quasi-fraudulent way.
- abalone 13y agoThe worst mainstream example of this I know of is PayPal. Their entire business is predicated on steering you away from using your credit or debit card (better for you) to a direct bank withdrawal (better for them). Bank withdrawals carry a risk of overdraft fees, have fewer consumer protections, and lack the rewards programs and other benefits of cards. But they cost less for PayPal. Merchants don't pay any less though -- it's how PayPal makes money. Each and every time it defaults to bank withdrawals. You have to hit "Change" to select your card, every time. There's no way to change the default to your card. The only reason for this UI is to steer customers away from their best interests.
- toupeira 13y agoI only have my credit card associated with my PayPal account, so I don't even get the option to use a bank withdrawal.
- T-hawk 13y ago+1. That's the only way to use PayPal as a consumer. If you're just a buyer and not a seller, there's no advantage to you to tell them about your bank account. They make some noise about a sending limit until you verify with a bank account, but I've never had any transactions run into that. I had my bank account connected to PayPal once, but deleted the association a few years ago. Somewhat surprisingly in the modern world of phantom deletion, there's never been any sign of it reappearing or Paypal trying to use or access it for anything. Each Paypal purchase uses only my credit card with no accidental way to do anything else.
- bartkappenburg 13y agoI guess we need to make an distinction between short and long term conversion optimization. How does a new and unexperienced customer at Ryanair feel when he sees the final amount he has to pay? It's obviously a good first conversion, but does it pay off a the second and third etc conversion for ryanair? Does he recommend the service? He has other choices and the one that tricked him doesn't feel that good anymore... Ergo: ryanair is optimizing short term conversion.
- ArtDev 13y agoThis is a problem with metrics in general. Short-term metrics are easy but long-term metrics are hard because of complexity. Also, quantifying human emotion (UX) is also hard. It seems like great companies have to rely on ethics, company culture and vision to make due in the absence of long-term metrics.
- eevee 13y agoMany of these could just as easily be the result of really bad UI design, especially when there are "technical constraints"—the RyanAir example in particular reeks of an opt-out being jammed haphazardly into an existing form to avoid adding another control. Hanlon's Razor, yadda yadda. These patterns aren't any better if they're accidents, of course, but there'd at least be a chance that the offending company would fix them.
- ArtDev 13y agoI used to work for a magazine who had specialists come in who recommended this kind of crap. This is not simply bad design.. these things are very deliberate and usually controversial within these companies that implement these tactics. Its a pretty standard story where Marketing is pushing for short term gains while IT/Web is thinking about the big picture.
- eevee 13y agoOh, I don't doubt that it's sometimes—or even often—deliberate. But if a UI is implemented badly, no one complains (because no one ever does), and the number of purchases/signups/whatever goes up, why would anyone bother trying to "fix" it?
- ArtDev 13y agoCustomer research brings it up.. if anyone is listening.
- ArtDev 13y agoI love the redesign of darkpatterns.org. I am looking forward to the form to submit a dark pattern. Keep up the great work!
- dclowd9901 13y agoAnd yet, AirBnb was tricking people into using their service by proxying machine generated emails through fake female personalities to bootstrap their service. I think the real trick is to dark pattern in a way that isn't offensive/egregiously negative to the customer.
- zsstor 13y agoCable providers have been the worst with this in my experience. No matter what you do it takes an ungodly amount of time to cancel service. There was a great Behavioral Economics course on Coursera taught by Dan Ariely that touched on methods like these, as well as subtler ones. I think the slide on Organ Donation was from him. https://class.coursera.org/behavioralecon-001/class https://class.coursera.org/behavioralecon-001/class
- rubyn00bie 13y agoPreface: I really like what the site is showing, the below is more food for thought, and perhaps a wee-bit of direction for those looking to persue it deeper. Also forgive me, as it became time to proof read, it became beer time. =========== I'm glad someone brought up behavioral economics... Below I've pasted the abstract for the original paper, organ donor paper [1]: "The well-documented shortage of donated organs suggests that greater effort should be made to increase the number of individuals who decide to become potential donors. We examine the role of one factor: the no-action default for agreement. We first argue that such decisions are constructed in response to the question, and therefore influenced by the form of the question. We then describe research that shows that presumed consent increases agreement to be a donor, and compare countries with opt-in (explicit consent) and opt-out (presumed consent) defaults. Our analysis shows that opt-in countries have much higher rates of apparent agreement with donation, and a statistically significant higher rate of donations, even with appropriate statistical controls. We close by discussing the costs and benefits associated with both defaults as well as mandated choice" 1.) I think what the website is trying to illustrate, is more specific instances where this is applied for bad (fair critique!). However, I think the abstract above bring up an interesting question: If the framing of an option(s) is causal [2] to it's propensity to be chosen; can one really be upset that their indifference is manipulated? I want to talk about the "good" application of this which is (arguably?) donating organs. It saves lives, and as it turns out, is dependent strictly on our indifference [3]. I suppose I'm inviting criticism, but what's wrong with that? The idea of saving a life, by most, is considered noble [4]. Even more so, if it was, indeed, important for us to conciously decide on-- why wouldn't we [5]? If it said: "Check the box to not be shot with a shotgun, at a distance of 3 feet, in the face, immediately after you turn this in?" ... after a few incidents, social knowledge would spread of the option to drive awareness. It's cost would be measured, most likely choosing indifference would be greater than. I would like to propose the juxtaposition of awareness, reaction, and marginal cost to us is quite large. The point: one is important for us and one is not, the effort to spread awareness or be aware is greater than the potential(?) gain. In the case of these businesses framing options for increasing profits, not that I think it's right [6], but is it really that dark? Aren't we essentially indifferent to the costs? Is that reason enough to be upset? Have any of these examples shown a cost which exceeds the cost of cognitively reasoning about it? If they have, and you do not opt-out, is there reason to be upset since the marginal utility of not-opting out is, matter of fact, greater to you, than opting out. 2.) If the examples shown on "Dark Patterns" are evil to you: learn about behavior economics and to spread the knowledge you gain. Learn about the roots, not symptoms, because the amount of change/awareness you'll be able to make is greater. Yes, it can be applied poorly, to decieve, but it's also can be applied for good. Being aware will make you less susceptible (not always, that's the gambler's fallacy) to mallace and probably make you insist on it for good (e.g. organ donating). A great Behavioral Economics paper, that also cites the original organ donor work[1] is "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics" by Daniel Kahneman [7]. I think the exploration, and awareness, of the application of framing (menu) options is great. I just hope it doesn't stop there :) [1] "Defaults and Donation Decisions" Author(s): Eric J. Johnson and Daniel G. Goldstein Source: http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/sites/decisionsciences/files/files/Defaults_and_Donation_Decisions_-_Transplantation.pdf http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/sites/decisionsciences/files/fi... [2] Yeah I said it, causal. I ain't talkin' no correlations 'ere. It's like a hypothesis but less complete ...it's actually for emphasis not a to say I believe it's a physical law (ex. the speed of light). [3] Using marginal utility is a way to remove indifference (I think it [indifference] is too hard to meaningfully measure) while maintaining the same conclusion. The marginal utility of filling out a form quickly, is greater than spending time deeply analyzing the cost and benefits of such a choice... [4] Noble: having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals. Source: Mac OS X Dictionary; definition. 2 [5] I find refuting this, in any sense, to be concerning and disheartening-- that is to suggest that a majority of people are inherently incapable. Should that be the case then I propose we as a species are incapable and prone to deciptive tactics. That would mean you too; you're no snowflake. [6] I believe it's a symptom. [7] "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics" Author(s): Daniel Kahneman Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (Dec., 2003), pp. 1449-1475
- reddit_clone 13y agoRecently I find it annoying that the button I don't want to click is all bright, blue and defaulted and the button I eventually want to click looks gray as if it is actually disabled. Even google does this.
- kalleboo 13y agoEspecially Google do this (everywhere they try to rope you into Google+)
- gesman 13y agoGoDaddy is the grandpa of auto-optins and upsells, should of been mentioned there.
- guhemama2 13y agoThere a nice book on "evil design patterns" called Evil by Design [1]. It's interesting knowing how we are manipulated (and how we can manipulate others, not necessarily for bad reasons) through design. 1- http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Design-Interaction-Lead-Temptation/dp/1118422147 http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Design-Interaction-Lead-Temptatio...
- aestra 13y agoI am not sure if it is a dark pattern, but I hate it. Hidden tax/shipping costs. I have to go through the entire check out process, which is usually multiple screens, and requires a credit card to continue to find out how much shipping will be at the final confirmation screen. Is this done on purpose so they think people are already invested in the checkout, so they won't abandon it due to high shipping? Or notice shipping? I don't understand why not just give me an estimate based on fuzzy location before I start the checkout process, so I don't waste my time if the total cost is too high.