Normalize clicks without Shady Tricks

Making money is an essential part of any business. To create more profit, many companies try to build a more customer-centric culture—they try to deliver a personalized experience and create an excellent customer service strategy.

Good user experience design is about providing the users with seamless, enjoyable interactions with products. It has the user’s best interest in mind and is not deceptive or sneaky in nature. These phenomenal experiences are created by various design practices after studying and learning more about the user. This approach can make a product stand out and provide good results for the businesses. Or, it can be used to manipulate the user and tricking them into making decisions that aren’t necessarily good for them but benefit the company. The latter practice is called creating ‘Dark Patterns’

Dark Pattern is a term used in User Experience that defines the art of presenting the user with crafty interface that tricks users into doing things that they might not otherwise do.

When you use websites and apps, you don’t read every word on every page - you skim read and make assumptions. If a company wants to trick you into doing something, they can take advantage of this by making a page look like it is saying one thing when it is in fact saying another. Using these dark patterns is not encouraged. They erode trust and take advantage of the individuals using your product.

I recently took up a keen interest in this topic, inspired by Paul Boag and Harry Brignull In this series I'll be trying to curate what these tricks are, some of the effects of using them and some alternatives. To kick-off, here are some real examples of the identified 12 types of Dark Patterns.

• Trick Questions - While filling in a form you respond to a question that tricks you into giving an answer you didn't intend. When glanced upon quickly the question appears to ask one thing, but when read carefully it asks another thing entirely

• Sneak Into Basket - You attempt to purchase something, but somewhere in the purchasing journey, the site sneaks an additional item into your basket, often through the use of an opt-out radio button or checkbox on a prior page. GoDaddy pre-selects an additional option (Privacy Protection) when users purchase domains.

• Roach Motel - You get into a situation very easily, but then you find it is hard to get out of it (e.g. a premium subscription, or deactivating your Facebook account). Ever tried to delete your Amazon account? Watch a video via here on how to delete your Amazon account :)

• Confirm Shaming - One of the most popular, the act of guilting the user into opting into something. The option to decline is worded in such a way as to shame the user into compliance.

• Privacy Zuckering - You are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to. Named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The information about what the company can do with a user’s personal information is located in Terms of Service, and almost nobody takes the time to read them.

• Price Comparison Prevention - The retailer makes it hard for you to compare the price of an item with another item, so you cannot make an informed decision.

In the screenshot of sainsburys.co.uk above, I’m trying to buy the same thing right? - Apples. So, why is one priced in kg and the other in units?

• Misdirection - The design purposefully focuses your attention on one thing in order to distract you attention from another.

• Hidden Cost - You get to the last step of the checkout process, only to discover some unexpected charges have appeared, e.g. delivery charges, tax, etc.

The subtotal for flowers on the 1-800-Flowers’ website was $54.99 when the item was added to the cart. The second image shows that the user would actually end up paying $83.94.

• Bait and Switch - You set out to do one thing, but a different, undesirable thing happens instead.

In this Windows 10 dialog, clicking on the X resulted in the upgrade being initialized—a completely unforeseen result for the majority of users.

• Disguised Ads - Adverts that are disguised as other kinds of content or navigation, in order to get you to click on them.

On yahoo mail, ads are styled to look like unread emails, making it too easy for users to accidentally click on the ad and drive revenue to Yahoo and their advertisers

• Forced Continuity - When your free trial with a service comes to an end and your credit card silently starts getting charged without any warning. In some cases, this is made even worse by making it difficult to cancel the membership.

I noticed this dark pattern on the Coursera.org website. Coursera, an online learning platform providing universal access to the world’s best education, has it’s UI is designed to push learners towards their paid offerings, and it confuses new learners regarding what’s free on the platform and how to sign up for it.

• Friend Spam - The product asks for your email or social media permissions under the pretense it will be used for a desirable outcome (e.g. finding friends), but then spams all your contacts in a message that claims to be from you.

The most famous example of this dark pattern was used by LinkedIn, which resulted in them being fined $13 million dollars as part of a class-action lawsuit in 2015.

While dark patterns might give a company short-term gains, such gains can cost them users in the long term. It’s always better to practice honest design. Sure, they will help achieve the goal but it's important that companies be aware that people know you are trying to manipulate them. When we design products, we should always put our users first. Strive to create transparent and user-focused products, because only they will survive the long-term battle for users.

What dark patterns have you encountered? Let us know in the comments ??

In my next article, I'll be curating some of the business effects of using dark patterns and some alternatives. Stay safe and healthy and remain in control of your user decisions as we strive to Normalize clicks without shady tricks :)