The Depressing Prevalence of Dark Patterns
I was scrolling LinkedIn recently, something I rarely do and should perhaps stop doing altogether, and I came across a post like this:
"We saw that customers weren't creating accounts when buying our products, even though the account icon was visible at all times at the top of the site.
We want users to create accounts when buying products because it makes it easier for us to track their usage of our site now that we can't create browser cookies without consent.
Our solution was to add a red X next to the account icon so users would get the impression that there is a task waiting for them that they haven't completed yet. Studies have shown that people are more likely to remember tasks they haven't completed than those they have. When they've created an account, they'll get a green tick instead of a red cross.
Due to this small change we saw a 50% increase in new accounts being created!
commence back slapping and high-fiving
This might seem like a relatively innocent update and probably the people who came up with it and integrated it never stopped to think about anything other than their abstract percentage click through rate.
Although not technically included in the list of Dark Patterns[↗], in my opinion this is still pretty obviously one of them.
The users of the site weren't creating accounts because it wasn't worth it for them. If having an account gave them any kind of real benefit then probably all of them would be doing it. However, instead of recognising this lack of basic incentive and making account creation more appealing to their users, they instead decided to use psychology to manipulate their users into doing something they otherwise wouldn't have.
This is just one example I noticed recently, but the more you think about dark patterns, the more of them you'll find. They're everywhere on the internet and I expect probably about 90% of all websites use them in some way. In fact LinkedIn is one of the worst examples[↗].
On the plus side, several authorities have been working to prevent the use of dark patterns online. For example, the state of California has enacted laws to stop sites from using Privacy Zuckering (tricking people into sharing private info they otherwise wouldn't want on the internet).
While this is good news, I think it's equally important for UX designers and web devs to keep in mind what the users of their applications actually want and what benefits them. As the people with the actual power to change the web, it's up to us to gatekeep it from the marketeers and sales people.
As internet users, allowing sites to manipulate their visitors is allowing ourselves to be manipulated too.