Usability Dark Patterns - learn it before they cheat on you!

Would you like to have a side dish for just $2?

When ordering a meal in a fast food chain, you hear a superb suggestion of choosing an XL version of your food bundle (“for as low as… X$”), or ordering an additional product (let’s say – a desert or a side dish) – sounds familiar, doesn’t it? No matter how frustrating this can be, when being in the “ordinary” stores and restaurants, you may always choose to say “no”. How about if all our purchases involved an automatic process of adding optional and usually unwanted products or services? And how about if the chances of saying “no” were deliberately made as difficult as possible, or even barely possible? No matter how unbelievable this may seem to be, such practices are already applied in some websites.

Unusability

The practices mentioned above were called Dark Patterns and they’re referring to the cunning usability methods that are used by companies and people who learned nearly everything on the most popular user flows, and they’re modifying it in a way which maximizes the conversion. It’s not only about usual well-known digital marketing practices (such us special application of colors and/or buttons’ location). Dark Patterns goes further - they describe a situation in which every user is treated as if he or she was interested in purchasing all additional or suggested products or services and when ones isn’t actually fancy buying it, he must undertake an additional effort removing items from the cart or extremely carefully reading all terms and conditions.

One from the first examples of such practices were banners deceptively resembling Microsoft Windows commands, to which - unlike with most ads - we got used to react in some way (at least by hitting an “x”). It’s true indeed that such banners remind us the web from the early 2000s, but they still can be encountered online. Now it’s rather hard to find anyone unable of recognizing an ad when seeing an example below, but at the same time everyone has been cheated at least once in a lifetime.

Read carefully

ZThose deceptive practices are can be even trickier – as they’re related to nearly any case in which conversion occurs. There are hundreds of examples of such solutions and many of them can be browsed on Harry Bingull’s Dark Patterns which was invented for the sake and the benefit of all internet users. Among many different examples in this site, it’s worth noticing two really unusual ways of presenting newsletter opt-in (opt-out) in the account registration form of some popular postal companies.

At the bottom of a first form we can read: „If you do not wish to receive communications from […] group, please tick the relevant box(es)”. Aren’t we used to the fact that a confirmation usually means an approval? Not here, the default (and not selected) option is a newsletter opt-in, and the possibility of opt-out is reserved only for those taking an effort of reading the full text of a disclaimer!

The account registration form in the second website goes even further. There are two questions there: not willing to receive newsletters from the site’ owner, you have to select fields, whereas not being fancy with getting tons of mails from site’ partners, you have to deselect fields. Is it possible to make it harder to understand?

Dark Patterns are also present in the e-commerce sites. After adding an item in one Polish store with electronics, a box with suggested (related) products is displayed - and this is, of course, usual and popular way of increasing the sales. However, in this example, related product is automatically added to every order!

Additional (and usually unwanted) products are being also added at the later steps of on-line shopping. Again let’s have a look at the example from another e-commerce selling electronics, in which an additional services (Careless Shopping agreement and Extended Warranty) – are shown in the nearly last step of checkout.

Sometimes it happens that those manipulative suggestions are more subtle, as in the example of another e-store. In this case the propositions of purchasing an Extended Warranty is displayed in a modal window popping out right away after adding a product to a cart. Despite the fact that this service is optional, it’s worth noticing that none of possible options is selected by default (different Extended Warranty periods or “no Extended Warranty”) and the only one which doesn’t increases the price of an order is paired with a negative message (“I agree to take a risk of not purchasing Extended Warranty”).

ODark methods of increasing site’ conversions are being applied even by the largest companies on the market. In the second step in a registration form of a famous supplier of different web services (including e-mail, videos and more) there is a message that encourages us to create an account in a certain social media platform. However this information is not exact – actually by the time you’re in the second step, your account in social site is already created and you cannot avoid or skip this. Even though the site says that you’re free to update your social media profile, there is no easy way of actually deleting your whole profile. So is there any way to delete? Help section – yes, that should be the best place to look, however information on deleting your account is not easily accessible, so you have to dig couple of minutes to find it.

Shall I use Dark Patterns in my website?

Usability Dark Patterns – as the name suggests – is rather uncommon and controversial trend, and probably you won’t find them in usability handbooks. What’s more you cannot avoid questions about the morality of such practices as Dark Patterns can only be effective when the users are less attentive or cautious. Although it’s probably hard imagining a case in which thousands of e-store users are frequently and accidentally buying unwanted goods, but on the other hand the accidental newsletter signup is much more probable and common. The existence of Dark Patterns in a particular site influences the general experience with a website, so when planning your new project bear in mind that even one user can fairly easy deselect (added by default) optional products or services, the fact of necessity of putting an additional effort to actually remove or deselect items doesn’t help with making the order process simple or easy.