Dark Patterns

As we all (probably) know by now, grocery stores are carefully laid out in a way to encourage or nudge you toward particular behaviors and purchases. Supermarket consultants make big money arranging stores based on psychographic analysis of the expected customers.

But this isn't a discussion of supermarkets specifically. If you're interested in how super-market layout and product placement influences your shopping decisions then Google is your friend. I'm not specifically suggesting that carefully arranged supermarket layouts are dishonest. But do understand that it's done to influence your shopping habits.

This article is about the unscrupulous web site equivalent of the supermarket designs I mentioned above. The term Dark Patterns (and Deceptive Design) is given to the deliberately sneaky layout, concealment, conditionals, and page progression used by website designers to unfavorably manipulate you for their gain.

It's Absolutely Everywhere

All websites are designed with the intention of influencing your experience by steering your behavior in a predictable way -- your clicks, what you read, etc. Even my website is laid out in a way that I believe presents my offers, articles, and such in a logical helpful way. That's all ok. But... when a site designer wishes to influence your experience in a way that is more beneficial to the site owner than it is to you, then the designer may use sneaky tricks or dark patterns/deceptive design to accomplish that. Most ethicists believe this is unethical.

Web site designers that resort to dark patterns do so because they know that pretty much everyone would choose against whatever thing they are pushing had they been upfront and honest in the first place.

If you've ever downloaded a toolbar or browser* add-on then you may have been a victim of dark pattern influence. Most people don't intentionally download browser add-ons other than ad-blockers -- and even that's pretty uncommon.

* Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc.

Retail sites that use dark patterns may include confusing verbiage that upon a quick glance appears to say one thing (something desirable) but actually says something else (something you won't like). Tactics include double negatives, confusing opt-out wording, and check boxes that you tick if you don't want the offer. It may be a confusingly worded unsubscribe link to get off some stupid email list.

These are carefully crafted and tested to ensure that an artificially elevated number of people perform the actions most desired by the site operator.

So let's go over a few examples...

Cart Packing

Our first example is Cart Packing. This might include an accessory, fee, or other unexpected cost that's quietly added to your online shopping cart that you won't see until you checkout. Maybe you are already many screens into a difficult or laborious purchase process (like buying airline or concert tickets) that are you loathe to start all over again to try to avoid it.

In the case of concert or event tickets, it's probably an expensive "convenience fee" and taxes that cannot be avoided. But by showing you that at the last step, the checkout, the web site operator, like Ticketmaster, is hoping that you are too invested in the process to abandon it all now. This is dishonest and has actually gotten the attention of congress. Will they act? Heh heh, probably not.

Or you could be booking a hotel room only to find a mandatory "resort surcharge", "energy recovery fee", or some such nonsense on the last screen where you'd normally confirm the booking.

Signing up for cable TV is rife with added junk fees, often worded to appear like they are involuntary government taxes or fees.

Roach Motel

Another dark pattern is the Roach Motel*. For example, LA Fitness (a nationwide gym chain) lets you easily sign-up online in a process that takes just a minute or two. But gyms like LA Fitness know damn well that people lose interest and want to cancel their memberships soon after joining. So to make cancelling as difficult as possible, LA Fitness requires members to snail mail a printed letter to their corporate headquarters and wait "6 to 8 weeks for processing". You cannot cancel online and not even by visiting the gym in person. The online signup process fails to mention that cancelling requires mailing a letter to the corporate office.

* If you're of a certain age then you remember the famous pest control ad, right? "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

Another Roach Motel: Our home phone service is Ooma which is actually a pretty decent VoIP system. A while back, I signed-up online for an add-on package of 500 minutes per month of international calling. About a year later we no longer needed that feature but I could not unsubscribe online. Worse, there are no instructions on how to remove the international minutes plan. The website was completely silent on that. I finally opened a chat box to ask an Ooma agent and they said that customers have to contact Ooma support. C'mon, really? The chat agent cancelled it for me, but I had to figure that out for myself.

Forced Continuity

Another dark pattern is called Forced Continuity. An example is when you accept a free trial for something then at the end of the trial your payment method is automatically charged a monthly, or whatever, fee sometimes without any additional warning.

I got snagged by this, too. We wanted to stream a movie on Amazon, but the only way to watch this particular movie was to accept a free one-week trial to Showtime. There was no purchase or rental option for the movie. Grudgingly, we accepted it, intending to cancel immediately after watching the movie.

Of course, we forgot all about it and only months later did I discover I had been paying Amazon $12 a month for a subscription service we never used (except to watch that one movie). I asked for a full refund and got it.

In the Amazon case above, the dark pattern wasn't something obfuscated or hidden. It was an obstruction (could not do action a unless we agreed to condition b) specifically designed to force a sign-up to Showtime in order to watch said movie. Amazon, in a subscriber-capturing agreement with Showtime, offered the movie via Showtime subscription only knowing full well that lots of customers, like me, would subscribe then forget to cancel. That is a dark pattern.

Privacy Zuckering

This one is huge. Facebook and countless other websites badly want your data. But they don't just come out and say it because no one would tolerate that. Buried deep, deep inside the Terms of Service* is the legalese that describes how your data is used (or misused). They know very well that no one except watchdog groups will ever read those walls of text a/k/a the Terms of Service. This is another dark pattern.

The more likely that someone (that's you, dear reader) might be reluctant about agreeing to terms in order to proceed, the more likely that said web site will obfuscate those terms. Websites and companies that do this are deliberately trying to deceive you! That should be illegal.

* The Terms of Service (TOS) is the document that gives websites and companies the permission and legal cover to do many of the dodgy things they do. Most TOSs are extraordinarily lengthy legal agreements, taking a long time to read and fully comprehend. This is deliberate.

Misdirection

Much of what makes close-up magic effective is misdirection. While a magician dazzles the audience with flourish and showmanship with one hand, their other hand quietly executes the real trick.

Same thing with websites.

When a web site wants you to choose among two (or more) options in order to proceed with some task at hand, like maybe singing up for something, the UI will often steer you toward the option(s) that serve the site's interest more than yours. They can do this many ways.

One common way to draw your attention is by use of highlighting, font, word choice (see next point), and positioning. The things they want you to click on are often highlighted to draw your eye. It may be a link with a large colorful rectangle around it.

The options they'd rather you not choose often blend in with the background and spaced away a bit, often below the highlighted option and, perhaps, hidden off the bottom of the screen where it would be invisible unless you scrolled down more.

Surveillance Pricing

While not exactly a dark pattern in the usual sense, e.g. not a sneaky user interface design, surveillance pricing is something that manipulates your experience to the site owner's advantage without your knowledge. You might say its dark pattern adjacent.

Some other terms for this are custom pricing and demand pricing. But I prefer the term surveillance pricing because it cuts right to the dark heart of what's happening.

The online businesses we all deal with daily know quite a lot about us, not only from publicly available data, but from your past and present actions and behaviors while browsing their online stores. Based on this trove of data, an online store could show you higher (or lower) prices than what they show other shoppers. That is, what the market (you) is likely to bear.

Physical retailers can't easily do this so they have to carefully price their products in the Goldilocks zone for their expected customer base -- not too low and not too high.

But for online stores, even the online versions of physical stores, they can easily do this, if they so choose. And they are quite likely choosing to do so.

Confirm Shaming

Naming for buttons and links are deliberate in order to encourage certain actions by appealing to vanity, sense of self-worth, pride, political identity, or social pressure.

Software vendors may offer "home" and "pro" versions of a product, with the pro version having an arcane feature or two that most people could do without. But by choosing what they call each version such as "basic", "pro", "premium", etc., they hope to encourage buying the more expensive offer.

Sometimes confirm shaming is something blatantly obvious and patronizing such as a newsletter unsubscribe link that reads "Unsubscribe from everything, I don't care about staying informed", or, when when refusing to sign-up for a rewards programs, a message like "No thanks, I don't like to save money" is displayed.

How Lawmakers Can Help

Dark Patterns are one of the (many) dishonest things that companies do because, unfortunately, it works. It cynically takes advantage of people, their understandable assumptions, and how complicated life is today, to rip them off. Our lawmakers could help.

For the Cart Packing dark pattern, companies should be required to disclose any and all mandatory fees and add-ons when the desired product or service's price is first displayed, and not sprung at the very end when you'd be ready to click the buy button.

For the Roach Motel dark pattern, companies should be required to offer a cancellation feature using the same methods that were offered for the original sign-up. For the LA fitness and Ooma examples above, that means requiring an online cancellation feature. Not one that requires contacting the company solely through other, offline ways.

Congress actually did address the Roach Motel problem (the click-to-cancel rule), but due to a technicality, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit threw it out. Will that ever be fixed? I wouldn't hold my breath...

For the Forced Continuity dark pattern, companies should be required to re-confirm the subscription a few days before it converts from a free trial to paid mode with a default rejection unless the user separately and explicitly affirms to an automatic conversion at the time of signing up for a trial. And declining any such automatic conversion must not lessen the trial experience.

For the Privacy Zuckering dark pattern, companies should be required to disclose in a clear and concise manner, without wading through an impossibly long Terms of Service statement, all the ways that your data will be shared and with whom. Furthermore, we need an EU-style GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) to help keep big tech at bay.

For the Misdirection dark pattern, companies should be required to present the available options such that all of them are plainly visible and equally presented. If the company wants to include accompanying narrative on why you should select a particular option, fine. But otherwise, all the choices themselves should be neutrally and equally presented with nothing hidden further down.

For the Surveillance Pricing dark pattern, I'm not sure what could be done. Demand pricing already exists for airline tickets, event tickets, Uber rides, and other "perishable" goods and services. although this isn't quite the same thing. I'm writing about this just so you know it's possible. As long as pricing isn't tweaked based on a protected class, like race, gender, age, etc. then it's probably legal. Moral or ethical? That's an whole 'nother conversation.

For the Confirm Shaming dark pattern, there's nothing really to do here other than to just ignore it. These are playground taunts. Don't fall for it.

Other dark patterns have mitigating solutions as well. But just like fixing many dishonest anti-consumer scams, it requires our lawmakers to care more about their constituency than their donor class/lobbyists and to pass remedying legislation. That's a big ask, I know. 🙄

Consider this

It’s one thing for a supermarket to arrange its store in a calculated manner. That’s fine -- everything is there for you to see, and the prices are clearly posted next to the products. No one’s following you around, slipping items into your cart when you’re not looking. It’s up to the product makers to entice you to buy. While that can be manipulative, it doesn’t rise to the level of being unethical, in my opinion. Well, perhaps kids' breakfast cereals placed at their eye level that are festooned with cartoons may might unethical.

But websites that employ dark patterns to actively deceive you are another matter entirely. These tactics come perilously close and, indeed, transition to outright fraud and lying -- they’re specifically designed to take cynical advantage of their customers and visitors. That is unethical, immoral, and should be illegal.

Why would you want to do business with a company whose first contact with you is already deceptive? Think about that.

Learn More

After observing and experiencing the things I discussed above, I started looking further into dark pattern web design. What I found was eye-opening -- more than just the few things I discuss above.

A con man can only trick you if you don't know the ways of the con. And that's really what this article is all about -- to make you aware that dark patterns are a thing and to watch out. Simply knowing they exist takes you a long way in helping to avoid being a victim of them.

You can google "dark pattern web design" -- there's a lot to read.