Courtney Linder* says many websites use deceptive design tactics, known as ‘dark patterns’, to coerce shoppers into spending more money.
Maybe you put a gadget in your online shopping cart and receive a push notification on your phone, urging you to check out before the item goes out-of-stock.
Or maybe there’s a huge banner on your favourite furniture store’s website, warning you that the brand is going out of business – so hurry up and buy everything that’s on sale.
But then, weeks later, you discover the gadget is still in stock.
And that damn furniture store is still open.
What’s going on?
This is the world of “dark patterns,” or deceptive design practices that websites use to trick you into spending more money.
A new study by a team of researchers from Princeton and the University of Chicago points out that of 11,000 shopping websites they surveyed through an automated tool, they found 1,800 instances of dark patterns.
What are dark patterns?
Think about the websites you love to use.
Maybe you hate Facebook because it feels bogged down by ads, posts, and notifications, but you love Instagram because it’s streamlined with just one feed that appears in a uniform pattern: square images with a little bit of text.
User interface designers are the folks behind the scenes, creating the look and feel of a website for the users to navigate around.
A user interface designer (or UI designer) is neither the good nor the bad guy; these people are simply doing what their title suggests, while juggling the needs of a client or employer.
Their job is to get you from click A to click B on a site to accomplish some specific goal (in this case, making more purchases).
They’re left to the devices of whoever is in charge.
So, if that client says they want a redesign of the basket on a commerce website, change will come for that little icon.
Dark patterns are essentially UI design choices that are meant to lead users to perform a targeted action: buy things.
Harry Brignull, a user experience specialist who helped cofound the Dark Patterns website – which documents instances of these design choices – first coined the term in 2010.
Brignull and Alexander Darlo, who edits the website, compile examples of these deceptive tactics both to raise awareness and to shame the companies.
These guys are thorough, partly because a huge network of Twitter users act as internet vigilantes, tweeting examples of dark patterns at the duo, which are then featured on the site’s “Hall of Shame”.
The authors of the new study, meanwhile, have built a website to summarise their findings.
They discovered 1,818 dark patterns, representing 15 different types of deceptive tactics.
The more popular the shopping site was, the more likely it was to use dark patterns.
Common dark patterns
Below are some of the strangest (and most annoying) design tactics that apps and websites will use to try to coerce you into spending more money, according to the Dark Patterns team:
Trick Questions: While filling in a form, you respond to a question that tricks you into giving an answer that you didn’t intend.
When glanced at quickly, the question appears to ask one thing, but when read carefully, it asks another thing entirely.
Sneak into Basket: You attempt to purchase something, but somewhere in the purchasing journey the site sneaks an additional item into your basket, often through the use of an opt-out radio button or checkbox on a prior page.
Roach Motel: You get into a situation very easily, but then you find it’s hard to get out of it (like a premium subscription).
Privacy Zuckering: You are tricked into publicly sharing more information about yourself than you really intended to – aptly named after Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
Price Comparison Prevention: The retailer makes it hard for you to compare the price of an item with another item, so you can’t make an informed decision.
Misdirection: The design purposefully focuses your attention on one thing in order to distract your attention from another.
Hidden Costs: You get to the last step of the checkout process, only to discover some unexpected charges have appeared (we see you and your processing fees, Ticketmaster).
Bait-and-Switch: You set out to do one thing, but a different, undesirable thing happens instead.
Confirm-shaming: The act of guilting the user into opting into something. The option to decline is worded in such a way as to shame the user into compliance.
Disguised Ads: Advertisements that are disguised as other kinds of content or navigation, in order to get you to click on them.
Instagram influencers who post about a product without disclosing a sponsorship fall into this bucket.
Forced Continuity: When your free trial with a service comes to an end and your credit card silently starts getting charged without any warning.
In some cases, this is made even worse by making it difficult to cancel the membership.
Friend Spam: The product asks for your email or social media permissions under the pretence it will be used for a desirable outcome (like finding friends), but then spams all your contacts in a message that claims to be from you.
This is how you get literally everyone to hate you.
Have you noticed one of these dark patterns on a website you’ve recently visited?
Mention @darkpatterns on Twitter or use the hashtag #darkpatterns to call out what you’ve found.
Darlo and Brignull say social media engagement is a good way to put pressure on companies to stop using these deceptive practices.
* Courtney Linder is Senior News Editor at Popular Mechanics. She tweets at @linderrama.
This article first appeared at www.popularmechanics.com/technology
