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10 Evil Types of Dark UX Patterns

How designers are using UX for evil.

Danny Sapio
UX Collective
4 min readFeb 24, 2020

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3D Devil Emoji — Winful

The UX field was born on the desire to improve the experiences and interactions that people have with products and services. But what happens when designers use those powers for evil? When designers use UX to cause users to take specific actions maliciously, these are what’s called dark UX.

The definition of dark UX, according to Harry Brignull, the UX practitioner who coined the term is:

“A user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things..they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.”

Dark UX is when designers create an experience that pushes users in a direction that benefits the interests of the company rather than the user.

This list is comprised of dark patterns from Harry Brignull’s writing and academic research. The text below is quoted from Brignull’s Typology.

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