Fear is the Path to the Dark Side — how to keep dark patterns out of good products
Dark patterns maximize numbers in the short term, but lead to frustrated customers, deleted accounts, and lawsuits.
Have you ever finished filling out a form on a website and realized you’re accidentally opted into deluxe purchase insurance and the e-newsletter?
Or when you were trying to download a file did you click on one of those big ads that says “Start Download” and end up subscribed to a porn cam channel?
You’re not alone. I study interfaces for a living, and I still do these kinds of things all the time.
Dark patterns are tricks in the UI that encourage the user to do something they wouldn’t have otherwise. Like opt into more expensive shipping, or agree to the sale of their data, or send messages to all of their Facebook friends hawking Farmville.
Dark patterns can be as mild as under-emphasizing important information by using neutral colors, and as aggressive as pre-selecting boxes in a checkout flow. The goal is constant, however. Manipulation to maximize some user behavior, like clicks or account creation.
If you have a healthy imagination like me, you’re probably imagining a ring of villains in cloaks gleefully shooting dark patterns out at us from the void. In reality, the villains are among us.
It’s a little more banal than that. You’ll find these patterns everywhere from spam sites, to the ‘utilities’ you know and trust, like Google and Facebook.
That’s because it isn’t as simple as ‘deciding not to use dark patterns’. Sometimes design teams full of fantastic humans working from a clean slate end up proposing some pretty nefarious designs. Sometimes you’ll propose them yourself.
When instructed just to maximize certain numbers like “Growth” or “Engagement”, even good people come up with bad patterns sometimes. Especially when design teams are unfamiliar with dark patterns, it is easy to wander into a deceptive design. Because at least in the short term, they seem to work.
“Dark patterns” sounds damn cool. I won’t lie, the term gives me dark-side-of-the-force vibes. But believe me — you don’t want these in your app. While dark patterns provide a near-term bump in clicks/likes/growth…long term they lead to frustrated customers, deleted accounts and lawsuits.
At Facebook I saw dark patterns periodically make it into prototype builds. At one point I realized I had routed all of my SMS messages through Messenger without wanting to. Happily, the company has a strong internal culture of calling its own bullshit and loooong, angry employee threads dedicated to the practice.
There is a ton of information on the internet documenting types of dark patterns. I suggest the following links to learn more and see examples.
Information on how to keep dark patterns out of your designs is much more sparse on the web. This article provides a few tips on how to keep dark patterns from sneaking through your creative process and into your project.
I Sense Great Fear in You
There are two main reasons people employ dark patterns in their designs.
- They are 3/4 or further into their transition to the Sith Lord and thirst for the power the metric bump will supply.
- They a normal kinda person — just afraid they won’t hit their performance goals…and the dark design seems to be working.
I am going to assume most people reading this article don’t want to entrap their users or defeat the Resistance once and for all. But when you’re deciding what to ship, your lizard brain can take over and override softer signals.
The best way to guard against dark patterns in your product is to address dark patterns structurally, early in the design process. In the heat of decision-making, it can be easy to go with the option that looks best on paper. The following tips are structural changes that help make sure you’ve weeded out dark patterns before they make it to the decision-maker’s desk.
1. Define task and experience goals
If your team goes into a brainstorm or design sprint charged solely with ‘maximizing metric X’, you’re going to get exactly what you asked for. And a ton of complaints from angry customers.
If you focus design efforts primarily on the user’s task or goal, you can avoid meaningless design tricks that just maximize clicks.
Bad Example: The design team is charged with maximizing account sign-ups on a news site. They make a new account for every person who visits the site and enters their email to unlock an article. Their numbers go up. Angry inadvertent account holders mass outside the newsroom with torches and demand the VP of Product’s head on a stake.
Good Example: The design team is charged with making news site account sign-up simple and intuitive for the user. They cut down account sign-up to a single screen, and pre-fill people’s email as a courtesy. Their numbers go up. The VP of Product keeps his head.
- Gut-check: what are you maximizing? At any stage of the design process, check in on whether or not you’re focused on a real person’s need or goal, or if you’re just trying to manipulate behavior to increase a certain metric.
- Bring your user to the brainstorm: cover the demographic profile of your user and give some context on the decision they are making or task they are attempting while using the product. Instead of asking for ideas that “maximize x…” ask people to come up with ideas that help the user achieve their goals “in a way that maximizes x…”.
- Encourage discussion of goals and values: one of Facebook’s saving graces was its healthy internal discussion of right and wrong. Whole teams might not realize the real-world impact of their design changes until someone in another part of the organization ‘experiences’ them first hand.
2. Embed decision-making tools
Why waste supervisor time spotting and weeding out dark patterns when you could avoid them completely? Empowering design teams to spot and avoid dark patterns means fewer interventions later in the process.
Teach UX principles to your designers and product managers. I usually start with Nielsen Norman’s phenomenal list of ‘usability heuristics’. For each user task or new interaction, I ask designers to run through this checklist of usability principles to identify potential issues.
If your proposed design violates any of the following, consider changing tactics or investing in additional user testing. From Nielsen Norman “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.”
- Visibility of system status — The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
- Match between system and the real world — The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
- User control and freedom — Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
- Consistency and standards — Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
- Error prevention — Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
- Recognition rather than recall — Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
- Flexibility and efficiency of use — Accelerators — shortcuts unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
- Aesthetic and minimalist design — Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors — Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
- Help and documentation — Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
3. Teach the way of the Force
Dark patterns work. It is unreasonable to assume designers and managers naturally know the difference between good and ‘predatory’ design without training. To make sure dark patterns don’t sneak into your product, you’ll have to invest in a little bit of education.
First, teach designers what NOT to do. Have a frank discussion with your design team about the benefits and trade-offs of using predatory designs using familiar examples like airline booking sites or email newsletter unsubscribe flows. One example is worth a thousand warnings.
Next, help designers do the RIGHT thing. As your team figures out the types of interactions that increase metrics without ‘tricking’ users, make sure those best practices are spread throughout the company.
Teams that experience success with things like particular colors, button orientations or language can publish their test results and discuss their choices internally. New designers can pull from ‘tried and true’ techniques rather than coming up with their own, potentially abusive, flows.
Company lore helps: At Facebook, there was a particular shade of bright blue that teams were warned not to use. It wasn’t that it didn’t work — it’s that it worked too well. Whenever this blue was utilized, people’s attention was drawn away from more important parts of the page and metrics inevitably went down.
You can also provide templates for specific interaction types as a starting point for design exploration. A template includes all necessary information and adheres to internal UI best practices. Designers can modify and expand upon the design, but the starting point helps maintain necessary context and information.
Templates aren’t confining when approached right. I encourage designers to think of them as a ‘jumping off place.’ Instead of asking the designer to go spend a few hours on Dribbble and potentially copy a harmful design pattern, a template provides a helpful nudge in the direction the user is already heading.
4. Test the waters
It’s fine to be confident in your design. You’re pure of heart, you didn’t intend to incorporate any dark patterns in your work. But you might be just like young Vader and the dark side could creep unintentionally into your work.
Best to check.
Plan to survey or check customer service reports for patterns of mistakes or frustrated expectations. If a significant number of people report frustration or surprise at the behavior of a particular interaction, that’s a great sign your design is having unintended negative effects.
Besides proactively reaching out to users to explore the good/bad parts of their experience, your best friend is in-app feedback or surveying. If you’re asking people to provide feedback on their experience, GET SPECIFIC to help yourself diagnose the issue.
For example, ask people why they are deleting their account. Instead of hating the benefits, you might find out they never intended to sign up in the first place.
Review of your site or app’s click data can also uncover unintentional dark patterns. Where do people get stuck and spend a lot of time? Where do people jump back and forth between options before selecting one? Where do people spend a lot of time — could they be lost instead of fascinated?
Do or Do Not — There Is No Try
Interested in dark design patterns? Want to learn some Jedi tricks to identify and combat them? Here are a few links from the experts to get you started.
- Types of Dark Patterns
- Dark Pattern Hall of Shame
- Dark Patterns and the Ethics of Design
- Dark Patterns, the Sinister Side of UX
Encountered or used any dark patterns of your own? Please share your wisdom with our padawan learners, comment below!
