Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
The Dark Side of UX
- 1. 1
- 2. The Dark Side of UX HOW WE TRICK AND SHAME YOU INTO DOING WHAT WE WANT
- 3. COURTNEY HEITMAN TECHNICAL ACCESSIBILITY SPECIALIST
- 9. HONEST DESIGN AID RAPID COMPREHENSION “We don’t read pages. We scan them” — Steve Krug MANIPULATIVE DESIGN HIDE KEY INFORMATION
- 10. HONEST DESIGN PREVENT MISTAKES “People tend to stick to the defaults” — Jakob Nielsen MANIPULATIVE DESIGN BENEFIT FROM MISTAKES
- 11. HONEST DESIGN SHOW USER REVIEWS “People will do things that they see other people do”— Robert Cialdini MANIPULATIVE DESIGN HIDE NEGATIVE REVIEWS
- 13. • Trick Questions • Sneak Into Basket • Roach Motel • Privacy Zuckering • Price Comparison • Misdirection Types of Dark Patterns • Hidden Costs • Bait and Switch • Confirmshaming • Disguised Ads • Forced Continuity • Friend Spam
- 14. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 1. TRICK QUESTIONS
- 20. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 1.5 – GUILT AND SHAME
- 23. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 2. PRIVACY ZUCKERING
- 27. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 3. MISDIRECTION
- 33. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 4. BAIT AND SWITCH
- 39. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 5. SNEAK INTO BASKET
- 52. No Travel Insurance Required
- 53. CONFESSION TIME
- 60. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 6. ROACH MOTEL
- 67. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 7. FORCED CONTINUITY
- 69. FTC Blog: Accentuate the Negative HTTP://BIT.LY/FTCNEGATIVE
- 70. A Taxonomy of Dark Patterns 8. FAKE ADVANTAGE
- 80. Ends justify the means?
- 81. Ends justify the means? 1. CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS COST
- 82. Ends justify the means? 2. LEGAL LIABILITY
- 83. Ends justify the means? 3. REPUTATION LIABILITY
- 85. BEWARE the power of the DARK SIDE
- 86. Resources • Harry Brindall’s Dark Patterns – www.darkpatterns.org • Qubit Meta - http://bit.ly/qubit-meta • FTC Blog: Accentuate the Negative - http://bit.ly/ftcnegative • Twitter – https://twitter.com/darkpatterns https://twitter.com/suckyux1
- 87. Questions?
- 88. Thank you! CONNECT TWITTER: @COURTNEYXANN GALLUP INSTA: @LIFEATGALLUP SLIDES http://bit.ly/ codemash-darkside
Editor's Notes
- Before we begin I’d like to do an informal survey. How many of you work in UX? Designers? Hate autocorrect?
- I’m a technical accessibility specialist at Gallup in Omaha, NE. And if you immediately thought, Gallup the polling company? Yes that’s the one, although we do much more than that. I’ve been in some form of user experience role for about 10 years now. I work in a new nitch UX market, where I help create a better user experience for people who are permanently, temporarily or situationally disabled.
- When I first started at Gallup around 5 years ago, I worked on our ecommerce sites as a UX developer. I spent 4 years working on our customer experience, determining ways we could create a better UX and UI or basically how to get people to press buy and give us their credit card details faster.
- Our stakeholders closely watch the metrics of purchasing hoping to see increased revenue. On the UX team, we assist by gathering analytics data, conducting user research, and creating A/B tests and multivariate experiments to make improvements.
- These website experiments work. In 2017, qubit published a meta-analysis of thousands of different web experiments. You can grab the pdf at the link above and if you have not seen it, I highly recommend it. They aggregated thousands of tests and categorized them by the nature of the experiment to determine which kinds of experiments yield the best results. They found that certain types of features performed consistently well in increasing the how much money you can make from a single transaction.
- In addition to increasing the amount spent, some experiments are shown to be particularly effective at increasing the number of sales in general. To clarify what would qualify in some of these categorizations: Scarcity: a limited stock, special editions Social proof: review scores, ‘popular’ items and seeing that other people made the same choice. Urgency: time limits, countdowns Abandonment: reminders of what you have in your cart or what you have been looking at recently. The top five items here have a greater than 70% chance of working and can increase revenue in the best case as much as 6%. When you make millions of dollars a year that’s a lot of money.
- We all know why these experiments work. They work because User Experience design is an application of psychology. The types of experiments that qubit show working are ones that most directly draw upon what we understand about people’s habits and desires. Psychology is the UX Designer’s greatest tool – but like all good tools, it must be used with care. So what kind of lessons do we learn as UX designers?
- Hands up if you’ve read Don’t Make Me Think. (evaluate) In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug teaches us that We Don’t Read Pages. An honest UX designer will use this to aid rapid comprehension using concepts like visual hierarchy to allow users to quickly find what they need. A dishonest designer can use this to hide information which may be useful to the user but inconvenient to the business.
- Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman group tells us that people tend to stick to the default choice. In honest design we can use this to avoid unnecessary mistakes (for instance, if most of your customers are from the US, maybe have that be the default address country). Manipulative design would use defaults as tricks hoping that the user either wont notice or are confronted with a burdensome challenge when they need to correct it later.
- Robert Cialdini in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion tells us that people follow other people’s lead. An honest design may show an unfiltered list of reviews, but a dishonest one might pick and choose – only showing the positive feedback.
- These manipulative techniques are what we collectively call Dark Patterns. Harry Brignull coined this term in 2010. He is a UX designer from Brighton, England - who started this website to raise awareness. The site names and shames organizations using these techniques. Brignull identifies numerous distinct patterns.
- He identifies 12 of them. I’m going to go through most of these with you and show you how they work in practice. A lot of them are often combined together.
- Lets start with the oldest dark pattern. Trick Questions have existed throughout human history. Gallup, as a polling company knows to stay clear of this dark pattern in order to maintain the scientific data of our results.
- Trick questions are a kind of user trap, forcing them to agree to things they did not intend. Advanced techniques use a combination of tricks to ensnare users. This is a trammel net – a kind of fishing net where fish may manage to avoid one net only to be caught by another.
- From the Pressed Juicery… I’m unsure if the cancel button actually cancels my membership or if it cancels me out of the user flow.
- There’s been a big uptick in tricky questions around users consenting to allow cookies on websites. For this particular example you need to click that hidden confirm selection link to not “select all and confirm”
- Because C is for Cookies and Cookies are for everyone on the internet to track your data with…. In the UK, the postal service Royal Mail are presumably very familiar with these:
- Hidden in a wall of text are questions designed to trip you up. If you want to avoid being signed up for emails you have to tick the first set of checkboxes However, but be careful to not tick the second set because those have the opposite logic where selecting them will opt you in. Of course, this is all OK because they adhere to the Data Protection act of 1981.
- As a side note I’m going to mention this modern strategy. It’s not so much a trick question as it is an emotional manipulation to promote a particular response. This has started appearing over the last few years.
- This sort of thing is called Confirm Shaming. If you want to opt-out you have to choose a patronizing or self-deprecating option.
- It’s possible the designers think this is cute or funny, but it isn’t and they need to stop. Also why is that silverware under the plate? That’s just idiotic.
- Privacy Zuckering is another modern dark pattern. The silly name isn’t especially self-descriptive but I’ll try to explain. Privacy Zuckering ‘suckers’ you into sharing something with your friends on social media. This will sometimes expose your entire list of contacts to a 3rd party. And yes Privacy Zuckering is named after everyone’s favorite social media CEO.
- To find out what’s in this month’s Ipsy Glam Bag, you have to share it on social media. These attempts are manipulative but they tend to at least be up-front about what is going on. Regardless, I suspect most users are unaware of the full consequences here, despite recent events.
- LinkedIn, for instance, have been the industry leader in desperately trying to get access to your contact network.
- In 2015, their sign-up process contained a manipulative practice where, as part of setting up your account, it asked you to ‘confirm your google account’. Email verification is very common and gmail is the largest email provider so this caught a lot of people off guard. This option was not an email confirmation at all, nor was it asking for the email address – they have asked for that already. By clicking Confirm my Google Account it would prompt you to give LinkedIn permission to access your email and address book. LinkedIn used this in both directions – you would have contacts already on LinkedIn invited to your network. Everyone else would get an email from LinkedIn saying you have invited them to join. LinkedIn was sued for $13m for unsolicited email spam as a result of these practices. The correct option here is to choose Send a confirmation email instead of the primary action. This is also an example of our next pattern:
- Misdirection is an aspect of many other dark patterns. The basic idea is to try to lead the user away from what they want to do so they do what you want them to instead.
- This is the screen you see when you click the Check In button on Delta. I first saw this a few months back and found it basically offensive. It seems like every airline is doing something like this. You will note that the main call to action does not have anything to do with checking in. You thought that was what you were doing but Delta would like you to do something else. You are presented with a choice with radio buttons that usually mean you have to choose one or the other but both actually upgrade your ticket... because when I booked this ticket I happened to forget that I really wanted to pay an extra $169 each way to go in first class, said nobody ever.
- Delta at least show their options in plain sight. LogMeIn have a sign up process where to opt-out of emails, you have to click a text link to reveal a hidden checkbox. I’m pretty sure our legal team would have me fired if I built this on one of our websites.
- Hiding things can work in emails too! Here the unsubscribe link is styled to look identical to the rest of the text. There are other examples where the link is the same color as the background. Meeting that CANSPAM rule but being sketchy about it isn’t something I encourage.
- Even when the options are visible, UX can screw over people who rely on keyboards. The tab order for this form will take you to the submit button instead of the checkbox to opt-out of email marketing. If you fill out forms by tabbing through them, this misdirection will trip you up. If you rely on a keyboard and screen reader, you may never be informed of the consent checkbox. This is not consent and the GDPR agrees.
- Remember confirm shaming? If you have learned to choose the self-deprecating option you will be tripped up by this popup. The way to skip this ad is to click the link at the bottom right of the screen. This is a typical example of using your own experience against you. There’s a term for this special kind of misdirection….
- This pattern is prolific on websites aggressively seeking ad clicks. Anyone who has tried to avoid the sea of fake Download buttons on a free software website will know this tactic well. The bait and switch can be very subtle as it relies on subverting the user’s expectation of what the action should do.
- To encourage users to upgrade from the excellent Windows 7 to the not-convincingly better Windows 10, Microsoft employed popups in the OS. For months, users became accustomed to dismissing a popup telling them to upgrade. Microsoft later changed the upgrade to a recommended update. Microsoft then showed this popup to inform the user. If, like always, they clicked the X to close the popup, Windows 10 would install. This is the opposite of the interaction they have been doing for months. To avoid it they had to click the ‘here’ link (the smallest one in the modal). The could then unschedule the upgrade – which is a complex task for some windows users.
- We never read the terms and conditions. Why would we? iTunes has 56 pages of them. So, we accept them out of habit. UX designers can abuse this. This looks like a terms and conditions page but it is an opt-in for unwanted software. The designer hopes that the user will press Accept like that always do, instead of Skip.
- Our habits as smartphone users can also be abused by advertisers. The Instagram ad on the left has a hair on the image, hoping that the user will swipe up to remove it. The ad on the right has a fake speck of dust to encourage someone to tap the ad as they try and clean their screen.
- Video game designers can take advantage of the medium’s repetitive nature. In a game with short levels, users will repeatedly hit this green primary action button to start the next level, especially early on when the levels are easy.
- When you run out of lives, the button that you instinctively press has become a buy moves action, initiating an in-app payment. This action isn’t required, you can restart the level, but to do so you need to press the x which you haven’t done to start a level before.
- On the subject of tricking people into buying things, our next pattern is Sneak into Basket
- These screenshots are from a talk that was given 2 years ago, but earlier this week I went back and validated them and guess what, they’re still roughly the same minus some content updates. So I’m going to go look at Go Daddy to see how easy it would be to buy a domain for a year. Home page – ooh domains as low as .99c in the first year. Let’s click Find Your Domain.
- I’m going to search for a domain. I now see that .99c is for .fun only and I want a .com. That’s ok, 11.99 sounds good.
- In my search I see the main domain I want – the .com, that’s great I can add it right there. I also see some optional upsells, a .us addon and a Buy 3 and save 69% offer. I’m going to ignore those for now but I’ll come back to the bundle later. Also note that there is a filter option to the left to find the top level domain I want. The checkbox style on this site is a solid green rounded box with a white check mark. This will become relevant later.
- Another upsell, with Privacy Protection selected by default. As it happens most other registrars now offer this for free because it’s possible that WHOIS doesn’t comply with GDPR. Anyway, choosing No Thanks is fairly straightforward. Another $8 saved.
- Here is another addon for email, also optional and the default is not selected. Not too bad. Especially because last time I did this talk I was presented with this:
- This checkbox looks like decoration. It isn’t the same style as all the checkboxes we’ve seen so far but it’s not decoration at all. This would sneak an item into your basket that you would be charged for a month from now. You can click the image to deselect this addon. Thankfully they removed this on my last visit but who knows when you try yourself.
- Once we pass by the addons we get to the real start of the checkout process. In addition to being inundated by promotions, there’s another nasty default here. The domain registration is set to 2 years which makes the price $26.98 compared to $11.99. The extra year was added in without my decision. I can change it. However, if you cast your mind back to the promotion I avoided early on which said I could buy 3 domains for $18 dollars, this is the screen I would see had I chosen that upsell:
- The $18 price is only for the added domains and only if you change both durations back to 1 year. Otherwise my purchase becomes $105! It’s not just digital product, sneak into basket can happen with physical items as well
- When renting this cargo van, this Canadian site pre-select this collection of shipping supplies that, should you choose the primary option would add them to your cart. Can you imagine this happening in a store? I’m wheeling my cart around the grocery store minding my own business and while I’m picking out carrots from the fresh produce section a store manager slips a bag of rosemary into my cart because it might go well and hey they’re just being helpful.
- One of the more famous older examples is this one from budget airline RyanAir. People don't read and they are familiar with the task of filling out passenger details. Title, First Name, Last Name, Country of Residence... They fill it out and don't consider the text. If you actually choose a country of residence here, you will have chosen to buy trip insurance.
- This option is also required. If you tried to progress it will bring up a big red box around ‘Please select a country of residence’
- This is evil genius levels of trickery. To opt-out, you need to find the No Travel Insurance Required option which is located between Latvia and Lithuania
- There it is, just south of Riga
- While RyanAir were deliberate in their evil, these things can happen unintentionally. Sometimes, by following best practices for revenue or engagement you can follow a dark pattern by accident. Hidden costs are particularly prone to this. [CONFESSION TIME] We at Gallup have unintentionally done this practice.
- We were looking at methods to improve sale completion on gallup strengths center, a website that has since been redesigned and migrated to a new site. One solution we tried leveraged the psychological principles behind abandonment. To buy on Gallup Strengths Center you need to register for a Gallup account. This is several steps so we wanted to encourage you to follow through. We hypothesized that showing you what you will lose if you don't complete a sale will encourage you to complete.
- Let me demonstrate one use case for this. Here I add a copy of Strengths Based Selling to my cart.
- In the design, we show a persistent cart through the whole checkout process and we make it clear what the stages of checkout are. I can see my item here at the Sign In or Register stage. We do not support guest checkout, so the user has to register and confirm their email address. It’s ok, I really want that book.
- I add my billing and shipping address as normal. This time I’m sending a copy of this book to a friend in England.
- Until I added an address, the site could not calculate shipping. So, this is the first time that we list shipping on the cart summary. The primary action on this page is to enter credit card details. An unintended side-effect of showing this cart on every page is that the user is now blind to it. They don’t notice the shipping, even though shipping calculation during checkout is fairly standard. And if you notice the shipping is $55.21. Once I enter correct credit card details, the purchase completes immediately without the user noticing the shipping. And internationally, this shipping is expensive! Before this design change, it wasn’t a problem on our site. We only showed the cart on this step until now. People expect shipping costs and the only physical product we used to sell was a very expensive coaching kit. The shipping to item cost ratio wasn’t out of the ordinary on the shipping method we defaulted to for that item. Then we added books and other cheaper items right around the time we made this design change. This is a hidden cost and international purchasers were being blindsided by this as a result of our design. We immediately took steps to correct this
- We have since changed the design in many ways but the final design had you choosing a shipping method The user knows what they are paying for and can make an informed choice. We also added free shipping tiers for domestic and international orders.
- The only thing worse than getting into something you didn’t want is when it’s hard to get back out of it. This pattern is the Roach Motel. Is anyone here a subscriber to NFL Game Pass?
- Ever tried to stop being a subscriber to NFL Game Pass? If you can't work out how to cancel your subscription, you can contact customer support. This happens enough that it’s a category of its own.
- If you do contact support, you will get this email with instructions on how to opt-out. Doesn’t seem so bad. Sign in, go to your account, choose subscriptions, choose Learn more then choose opt out. OK.
- These instructions are a lie. There is no learn more, no opt out. You can either call customer support on the phone or cancel your credit card – your choice.
- Ever tried to log in to Spotify with an account that you originally created via your Facebook account? I have. It becomes especially difficult to do after you deactivate your Facebook account. A few years ago this step automatically reactivated your Facebook account, which was super cool. Not. Today the flow looks something like this: First it tells you, you don’t have the right username or password. Cool. I’ll just reset that.
- Then you get told that your account was disabled. Cool fine. How to I enable it? Well here’s where it gets funky. You have to fill out a contact form that is buried several clicks deep in a FAQ section where you then chat with a client support rep, where they ask you to remember your facebook username! It’s taken me over 5 years to get to into my Spotify account since deactivating Facebook, and they eventually just reset my email so I had to sign up for a new account. This is a roach motel if I’ve ever seen one.
- Roach Motels are easy to get in and hard to get out. Gyms are especially good at this. Easy In – a million ways to sign up and you don’t pay a penny today! Difficult Out – Print out this form mail it to this PO Box number and hope we don’t lose it before we charge you for next year’s expensive membership.
- This kind of subscription model is its own dark pattern called Forced Continuity. The FTC refer to this as Negative Options. The definition varies. Some say this covers all ‘first month free’ style offers. Others use this to describe situations that force you to subscribe to product B to get product A. Either way, this practice is now illegal in the EU. I’m sure most of you have signed up for a service that used this type of automatic charge after a free period.
- LiveNation were sued for abusing this pattern. When selling concert tickets, they used a sneaky opt-out-only subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. Free for the first month, $12.95 thereafter. Unsubscribing from this required mailing in a cancellation.
- Worried about being sued? Don’t worry, the FTC have a blog post to help you keep your subscription scam legal!
- The last pattern I’m going to talk about today I’ve called Fake Advantage. This is not directly named on darkpatterns.org so the definition is my own. I’ve observed a massive growth in this pattern and it’s frankly a unfortunate sign of the times that you can no-longer trust things you see on the internet. Lets take another look at that table from qubit
- The top three here rely on psychological factors that make you feel like you have the chance of a lifetime so you better take it now: There’s only a few left Other people are buying this one, I should too There’s only a limited amount of time before this goes! But what if this perceived opportunity was exaggerated?
- This is the room grid you see on Booking.com when you are searching for a cheap hotel room. Before this page you would have chosen this hotel from a list of search results. There’s a lot going on here and most of it is irrelevant. The big red ‘someone just booked this’ with the clock icon doesn’t indicate whether it’s on this date. The same is true of the claim that 33 people are looking at this now. Even if someone booked these exact dates, they will show this notice if someone booked as much as 24 hours ago. One booking a day isn’t exactly urgent but it adds both a sense of both urgency and social proof. Only 3 rooms indicates scarcity and maybe it is or maybe they will still have 3 rooms tomorrow. “33 other people looking now, according to our Booking.com travel scientists.” – don’t blame scientists for your dark doings. The Jackpot notice is hillariously misleading. Even though you saw other hotels, with prices, on your search results, this is the hotel first you look at the rooms for and obviously the first one will always be the cheapest you’ve seen. Every time. This is not an advantage. The discount here also looks like a good deal but you don’t have a good means to compare the rates.
- Hovering over the details shows you this wall of text. If you read it, and think about it, this ‘genius’ benefit basically translates to ‘This room is in the cheapest 95% of rooms’. Not much of an advantage.
- Finally we have the review score – more social proof. Except Booking.com uses a considerably skewed scale. Each category has 4 ratings with different smilie faces. These equate to the values from highest to lowest of 10, 7.5, 5, 2.5. The total score is a grand mean of these. So even if you think the cleanliness was the worst you’ve ever seen, provided the location was good and the place was cheap you will likely still give this a good score because the rating is biased. This score is then aggregated with all the other probably good scores. A better distribution of values here would be 1, 4, 7 and 10.
- Scarcity, social proof, urgency – all exaggerated. There are aspects of the truth on booking.com but they blow them out of proportion. But what if we took this further? What if we straight up lied about the advantage you have?
- I’m going to visit viagogo, a 3rd party event ticket reseller. Even if you are not familiar with this particular vendor you are presumably familiar with online ticket sales.
- You can find them in Dante’s circles of Hell between The Gluttons and the Wrathful.
- This video is going to show me looking for tickets to Pearl Jam show in Seattle. These tickets have been on sale for some time. Once you choose an event you are presented with this progress bar where they tell you they are looking for available tickets. You are shown that people are currently looking at tickets and that only 1% of tickets remain. In a prior design viagogo actually showed a visual queue of people ahead of you indicating that you were waiting for other people to finish their purchases before having a chance at buying. They would then stack other people visually behind you. These days they just have you stare at this progress bar. The interesting thing about this progress bar is that it’s entirely fake. There are no network requests updating the status, it’s just making you wait 60 seconds before you can see if there are any tickets left. The result here is growing tension – what if those people buy the last of the good seats! Lets see what happens when they find tickets for me (wait for video end) Oh no! My worst fears have come to pass – all the best tickets are sold out and they literally sold out right before my eyes! If I don’t hurry that ‘hot hot hot’ ticket that’s left might sell out next I need to buy immediately! It’s totally fake. These tickets didn’t just now sell out, they sold out days ago.
- Here is a code snippet from StubHub. They were shamed on social media for this exact practice. The code here is easy to read – if there are 5 or more listings, insert a sold out listing into random position from 2 to 5. If your boss asks you to write this code just say no.
- But, you might say - Metrics show that these strategies work! So if they work shouldn’t we be doing them? While I hope you already know the answer to this, let me give you some pretty simple reasons why reproducing these dark patterns can be very bad for business.
- Customer service calls are not free – they are also not cheap. Credit card chargebacks are expensive. If users feel they have been mis-sold and complain about it, it can cost more than the extra revenue you intended to make.
- Many of the companies using these tactics have been sued. Can you be sure that the gains are worth the risks involved in a civil or federal lawsuit? Some of the examples shown here today are in direct violation of GDPR which, if you have EU customers could see you faced with truly massive fines.
- And finally, your reputation is at risk. At the start of this talk I asked everyone if they hated autocorrect. Can those who raised their hands put them up again? Roy Baumeister in his paper “Bad is Stronger than Good” draws on a wide range of peer-reviewed studies showing that negative experiences have a far greater impact that positive ones. Autocorrect likely fixes typos and speeds up your texting the vast majority of the time. If texting were better without autocomplete, it wouldn’t exist. Except that’s not what we remember. We remember this:
- This is the most safe for work example I could find. Remembering painful or, in this case, embarrassing things is an evolutionary advantage. If we remember the time something hurt, we will hopefully not repeat it and live longer. This is the reason your brain will continue to remind you of that dumb thing you did at school even though everyone called their teacher Mom at some point! This memory also applies to negative brand interactions. If people have a bad experience on your website because of deceitful design, they will need a lot of positive experiences to overcome the negative opinion of your brand. You may make the sale but you’ve lost the customer and their friends.
- In conclusion, you’ve heard about the dark side now so be more aware of how you’re designing and don’t let people sneak darn patterns into your company’s UX. You can also be more aware at how other companies are trying to manipulate you into doing what they want you to do.
- Thank you. Any questions?