Why are dark patterns still prevalent?
Where We See Them and an Academic Reasoning Behind Why They Persist
Quarks are scientifically believed to be the smallest particles in the world. However, the close ‘X’ button you’d see in mobile game interstitial ads give quarks some strong competition.
You click on it, and immediately get redirected to the app store. You think you missed the button, but you were actually tricked since the close button was part of the image/just plain inaccessible due to size.
This is an example of a dark pattern. Dark patterns are carefully crafted tricks used in websites and apps with a solid understanding of human psychology to get users to do things they didn’t intend to, like buying or signing up for something. They exploit the fact that users skim through websites quickly, wanting minimum friction, not paying attention to the entire content, hence agreeing to whatever the website asks them to do.
Dark patterns are the opposite of what we should celebrate in design thinking. These experiences are made to benefit the company at the cost of the user.
Nobody is innocent, tech giants, like Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Amazon, Apple, and many such others employ dark patterns into their strategies.
Why do products employ dark patterns?
Let’s see some examples.
1. Privacy Zuckering
Dark patterns have become an enabler for data brokering or ad tech companies that rely on silently mining user data and manipulating their decisions. In the above example, Facebook notifies the users about storing their contacts, an average user would click through without realising they just sold out their contacts to the firm. This example of Facebook sneakily extracting personal information has been aptly coined as ‘Privacy Zuckering’.
Keep in mind Facebook was the centre of Cambridge Analytica data scandal where the firm improperly obtained data from tens of millions of Facebook users to target American voters during political campaigns. Dark patterns are the bread and butter of product design to get this kind of activity moving.
2. Bait and Switch
The bright red cross button means “Close”, right? Well, Microsoft begs to differ. In 2016, the company constantly bombarded users with pop-ups to upgrade to Windows 10. When users resisted doing so, Microsoft made clicking of the cross button to actually initiating the OS updation.
3. Forced Continuity
Subscription-based companies automatically bill your credit card as soon as your free-trial period ends. They take consent from you for doing so, by mentioning it in “Terms of use”, but who reads that? Hence, dark patterns can cost you money directly.
4. Ad Tracking
Apple uses Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), which tracks browsing activity that advertisers use to target ads. Although Apple allows users to turn it off, here comes the tricky part. The label says “Limit Ad Tracking”, which is confusing since it is a double negative, and turning it off actually means turning on the ad tracking feature.
5. Persisting Notifications
LinkedIn notifies you whenever it’s your connection’s birthday, and you’d rather not wish an acquaintance there. So, you explicitly turn off birthday notifications, but LinkedIn stops notifying you about everything altogether unless you turn on birthday notifications again.
6. Hidden Costs
E-commerce websites are heavily complicit in this tactic as well. For example, one of the reasons you shop online is to buy stuff at lower prices. But as soon as you reach the last step of buying process, you discover delivery charges, tax, add-on prices, and now the “low price” isn’t that low anymore, in fact, it’s higher than the market price, all thanks to the “Hidden costs” employed by these websites.
7. TurboTax; Obfuscating Free Services
TurboTax tricked the customers into paying to file their taxes, which is supposed to be free for many. They had 2 websites, one asks you to pay even though you are eligible for free tax filing by moving 9 out of 12 categories under deluxe tier, and the other, which is actually free to use, but impossible to find.
Looking at these instances, the evident goal for every product is to accrue wealth. With the ever-increasing pressure of achieving unrealistic business goals and growth at a non-viable rate, dark patterns help them satisfy short-term goals, like faster conversion rates or generate more sales in a shorter time.
Dark Patterns are harmful, not just for design, but also for business.
Although this manipulative design is an easy route to boost revenue, it’s at the expense of brand image, reputation, and user experience. The companies might cheat their customers once by selling an empty box, but it backfires in the long term. The customers soon realise they have been duped and abandon the products due to distrust and frustration. This prevents the influx of potential new customers and also makes it difficult to retain loyal customers.
Why are dark patterns still prevalent, regardless of the annoyance they create?
Psychological research on human-computer interaction
To understand why users accept certain products with these patterns, we need to understand the human relationship with technology at a fundamental level.
In 1947, an experiment titled “Psychological Aspects of Instrument Display: Analysis of 270 P Lot Error Experiences in Reading and Interpreting Aircraft Instruments” was conducted on the U.S Air Force pilots at the Wright-Patterson base in Dayton, Ohio, that gives us great insight into this.
They were given aircraft reading instruments to use in a flight simulation set-up, however, in the experimental group, the pilots were purposely set to fail.
It was observed in post-study interviews that pilots tended to blame their own skills in the context of the reading instruments, rather than blaming the instruments, because of their low understanding of core technology behind it.
What does this mean for digital products and product design?
Unethical aspects of the design may fly under the radar primarily because people are unaware that they’re intentionally manipulated BY DESIGN.
The same logic can be transferred to the context of modern-day technology employing dark patterns and humans just not being able to see past them. These tricks go unnoticed easily forgiven because people are likely to blame their own perceived incompetence with technology, as opposed to blaming the technology itself.
For example, you open Instagram, you see your notifications (on the prompt of the famous ‘red dot’), you close the app. Yet, a few minutes later, you open the app to see the same red dot, only to realise there was actually no new notification. You tend to blame internet issues or think it’s a minor glitch in the app or an issue with your phone. But in reality, this wasn’t a mistake, it was an intentional dark pattern.
Be good, design for good.
Ethics can help drive the domain of design and mitigate the underhanded strategies; otherwise, the domain itself stands to lose out on its legitimacy. With fair and ethical design thinking, you provide a more meaningful and honest experience to the user while still creating user flows that help achieve your business goals and retain the general goodwill of the user. The direction to move in is pro-privacy, pro-user control, presenting good faith choices and therefore anti-deceptive-design.
Here are some more resources to understand the ethical implications of dark patterns, their eventual pitfalls and how to mitigate them:
The Canvs Editorial team comprises of: Editorial Writer and Researcher- Paridhi Agrawal, the Editor’s Desk- Aalhad Joshi and Debprotim Roy, and Content Operations- Abin Rajan
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