A team of US academics have published research, Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites, which they believe shows the massive prevalence of sneaky user interface tricks designed to catch us out.
The seven deadly sins of the 2010s: No, not pride, sloth, etc. The seven UI ‘dark patterns’ that trick you into buying stuff
Dark patterns – user interfaces designed to deviously manipulate people into doing things – have become common enough on websites and in apps that almost two dozen providers have sprung up to supply behavior persuasion as a service.
And in some cases, these firms openly advertise deceptive marketing techniques, describing ways to generate fake product orders and social messages celebrating those fake orders.
These are their proposed categories of user-interface tricks.
Sneaking
Attempting to misrepresent user actions, or delay information that if made available to users, they would likely object to.
Urgency
Imposing a deadline on a sale or deal, thereby accelerating user decision-making and purchases.
Misdirection
Using visuals, language, or emotion to steer users toward or away from making a particular choice.
Social proof
Influencing users’ behavior by describing the experiences and behavior of other users.
Scarcity
Signalling that a product is likely to become unavailable, thereby increasing its desirability to users.
Obstruction
Making it easy for the user to get into one situation but hard to get out of it.
Forced Action
Forcing the user to do something tangential in order to complete their task.
‘Urgency’ and ‘scarcity’ sound like pretty standard advertising methods that we should be very used to by now, but some of those others are very dubious. Here are some screenshots from the research paper.
Fig. 3. Three types of the Sneaking category of dark patterns.
Fig. 5. Four types of the Misdirection category of dark patterns.
What can be done? Here’s one idea they discuss in the paper which I like the sound of.
Fig. 10. Mockup of a possible browser extension that can be developed using our data set. The extension flags instances of dark patterns with a red warning icon. By hovering over the icon, the user can learn more about the specific pattern.
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