Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Ok, so you have hours of when I can cancel...clearly not because you have shift hours, since I'm talking to a machine. So why do you have specified hours?
Stamps.com billed me for 8 months before I noticed they were billing me. I only noticed it because I was doing my taxes. The billing size was just small enough to fly under my radar, but just big enough to hurt a bit. I feel that chose that pricing for that reason.
Anyhow, I saw they were in this story, so I felt I would expand upon their "dark patterns."
The most horrifying variant I've seen recently was a government website that kept 9am-5pm hours. No human interaction or real-time events anywhere, but logins were locked after business hours. I'm guessing they didn't want to arrange special downtime periods for changes, and the only alternative they could think of was 16 hours/day of scheduled downtime.
It's a bad day when registered mail would be easier than using the automated system.
In Sacramento, landing a "state job" is kinda like winning the lottery because you know you're set for life. What's not to like about a job with no perceived accountability or risk and a perceived loot table that just gets better with time.
The inevitable flip side are all the "losers" of the lottery who have to suffer the vagaries of market forces. What's not to dislike about someone else lucking their way into having all those wonderful things?
There's a strange love/hate relationship with civil service in Sacramento, at least from my own experiences.
Sometimes this is done because the "opening times" are baked into existing process, (or in some cases, legislation), and so the digital replacement for the old meat-and-paper process must be subject to the same seemingly crazy time restrictions.
It seems mad, but if you're an underfunded branch of the state, trying to replace a paper-based process with a website, on a staff of junior developers and over-stretched project managers, well....
EDIT: or the process hinges on an aging perl/oracle/Solaris stack, with a pile of cron jobs which process the day's activities overnight. And of course, the definition of a "business day" is baked into the legislation, so the first job needs to start at 5:10 sharp.
Source: I've seen it with my own eyes.
Free internet at libraries could've been a way to work around this inequality of access, but the libraries have business hours too
"Makes sense" does not mean "good", but I do understand the madness a little better now...
But then again, that was just an assumption so I may be way off base.
Looks like the Sabbath violation would be on their end, when they take money for a service, so the problem only arises when during their local Sabbath hours.
If you're savvy or have had it happen before, you know to avoid it, but otherwise it's a financial landmine ("profit center") waiting to be stepped on.
If you're an HNer and you perpetuate this rubbish please stop and grow some ethics.
Anyone else think this could work?
[edit: forgot a word]
For example, a few days ago there was a Show HN about PlateJoy, which sounded really interesting. But, the only way I could learn about it was to enter my email and take a quiz. Now enters the part where the antics of countless other bad actors takes its toll on an otherwise innocent website; I decide it isn't worth the risk and move a long.
requiring an email address to access a service is no more of a dark pattern than requiring payment to access a service. they're taking something of value in exchange for providing something of value. it's only a "dark pattern" if they trick you into providing your email address somehow.
Emails on the other hand can reliably fetch prices/be put to use.
Apparently the value wasn't high enough for you to sign up. That's fine. But why is it a "dark pattern"?
A lot of things that "startup guru" advise are light shades of scams. A honest business deal is when a customer is given enough information to evaluate the proposal and then gets an option to decide - without influencing - to enter the transaction. One needs to keep that in mind.
In this case - it's what 'throwanem replied - "you can't fairly evaluate the offering if you can't see it until after you've already given away the item of value".
I appreciate what you're saying about an honest transaction, but "dark patterns" is a useful term that is being diluted to apply to any company that doesn't offer everything for nothing. If asking you to create an account to use the product is a "dark pattern", what do we call moving buttons to capture accidental tricks, getting you to open your contact list with tricky wording and spamming everyone, etc? Surely those aren't the same as "please create an account to use our product"?
(I feel like I should note that the default presumption here is of sketchiness, not uprightness. Maybe that's unfair, and maybe there are a lot of us out here who've been hosed often enough by bait-and-switch games that anything which smells of yet another one gets tarred with the same brush. I don't think that's an argument against the article's thesis, you know?)
What I meant was that "it does NOT matter" whether it's a UX bug or an intentional pattern. The effects can be the same. If a company doesn't have a lot of money to produce a good UX because they spent it all on trips up to Tahoe for a "workcation", and people rely on that software, it's the same damn thing no matter how you look at it.
i.e. a lack of intent is just as bad as ill intent, in some cases.
Sure, it could be darker. But when you see a bit of a crummy pattern you usually walk away instead of checking out just how bad it could get.
"A Dark Pattern is a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things."
Simply making a user sign up to use your service is hardly a 'carefully crafted trick'.
What's worse, Cortana has ruined Windows search. Searching from the Start Menu is way less expansive and useful in 10 than was in Windows 7. (I never used 8, so I can't comment there.) It's like it's punishing me for not using something that breaks how I want to work anyway.
So while I used to be able to search for a folder on my D:\ drive by hitting start and typing its name, now I have to either go to the actual Windows Search, or navigate to the folder manually. Even if that folder is indexed in Windows Search, and I have full permissions on it.
from my PC out of my cold dead hands... :-)
Can you tell me - do you have Cortana's voice stuff enabled? Do you have her "learning" about you enabled in settings? Did you upgrade to W10 or do a fresh install?
[1] http://superuser.com/questions/1105529/cant-search-folders-o...
In a theoretical world, consumers are free to simply buy whatever they like, and their purchases directly reflect their intent to reward the company that made the product they're buying. In the real world, there is lock-in, there are exclusive vendors, there is employer mandate and inflexible custom processes with dependencies, there are other forces that make it so you almost have to buy certain things. Windows is definitely one of those things that many users feel they practically have to buy, whether they like it or not.
Every vendor of computer products (hardware or software) is trying to achieve this lock-in effect, because it means a lot of easy money, a much more stable and less sensitive income stream.
Then, to make it better, they started calling me every day after I canceled my subscription.
I was going to recommend them to all my friends and family, but instead I did the opposite -- I told everyone to avoid them and only mentioned the negative aspects of their service.
It's been lovely. More companies should do this, because it makes me actively want to support them.
I consider myself a savvy shopper. I pay attention to every single charge, I read the fine print, I keep spreadsheets for "cancel dates" but even I've been burned before. I apparently signed up for auto renewal with magazines.com. They at least emailed me before renewing but I had to call to cancel that and I was on hold for a while. Wouldn't have signed up if I knew there was that annoyance to deal with.
I guess selling an actually-good product with few competitors has its advantages.
FWIW, I got terrible food poisoning from one of Green Chef's meals. Always make sure the food is still cold when you receive it, I thought it was "cold enough" but I was wrong.
I was in the middle of a game when the stupid ad for Web TuneUp[0] appeared from my task bar over the screen. The linked image is exactly how it appeared with the auto-confirm box pre-checked. In a rush to dismiss the ad to get back to my match, I accidentally clicked the OK button instead of the tiny decline.
Of course, uninstalling that travesty was a nightmare.
[0]: http://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/01/avg-putting-millions-of-chr...
[0] - http://tinybuild.com/g2a-sold-450k-worth-of-our-game-keys
They ask a million times if you're sure and then offer another million other options (suspend the account for a few months, after which they will automatically charge you again). After you get through that, including a screen warning that you will lose unused credits, they offer a plan that will let you keep the credits you've already paid for by paying them another, smaller sum (I think $10 a year).
I will definitely think hard before reactivating.
Maybe other people like that, but this basically tells me that their good customers pay more than they have to, because they are fools that don't complain, possibly subsidizing the grumpy ones. And I find this to be totally unacceptable.
For anybody interested in an Audible alternative, check this out: http://downpour.com
That's DRM-free, high quality audio books at comparable prices.
By the time I got to the end of the endless "are you really sure about this" and one time offer pages I was so annoyed I decided I'd never renew.
I tried to use Uber for the first time yesterday (in Moscow). The car wouldn't come for way too long, so I clicked cancel and thought that was it. I even selected a reason for cancelling. As I was walking home, a driver called me saying that he had arrived. I said that I had cancelled the trip a long time ago. Then the app showed that my trip cost 0 and asked to rate the driver, which I did.
When I came home, I discovered that they sneakily took money for that trip! I complained to the support and they said it's working as intended, but they refunded me... in bonus points that can only be used to pay for Uber, which I never intended to use again after this "experience".
The article says that they imply "cheapest at the top". No, the flights aren't shown "cheapest at the top", and they never imply they are. They're sorted in chronological order.
There is a summary item that says the lowest fare for a booking class that day, but that's all.
That sentence makes it sound like they deliberately always put the 2nd lowest price as the lowest every time. It was pretty misleading or poorly written.
If I saw those boxes across the board, like in their example image, it doesn't take a second thought, it's "obvious" (to me anyway), that those are the "lowest, per class".
Pisses me off every time.
I have yet to encounter a PDF that doesn't render correctly in FireFox's built in PDF.JS. I know Reader has additional features but I've honestly never used them. You can easily set FireFox as your default PDF view and you're off to the races.
My only gripe is the PDF icon is now FireFox's icon.
It unselects everything by default...
However, if Unchecky unchecks everything then, even if you don't pay attention, you win vastly more than you lose.
Would you like to sign up to our newsletter? o [[[ OK!! ]]] o No I'm an idiot and I don't want to save money or hear about the latest job offers that may change my life
(Exaggerated slightly.)
I'm not sure this if this technically counts as a dark pattern as it's fairly transparent but I find it is very annoying because it is an attempt to force a user to state an opinion they probably don't hold if they don't want to sign up for whatever service.
I assume it does work or it wouldn't spread so widely but exploiting people's reluctance to criticise themselves seems quite unpleasant: I imagine this affects people with the weakest self-esteem the most.
A lot of sites using that technique also let you click an X button or click the darkened non-form area to continue. If that's supported, I always choose it as a tiny protest (in hopes that someone actually profiles how click-outs are happening).
If you make users click something obnoxious and self-deprecating to continue, then I'd certainly call that a dark pattern. It's like an incredibly mild version of the cult tactic where you shame people for skepticism.
I click the X/non-form area because I'm too lazy to read the text and figure out which of the buttons won't lead me to another form/sign me up/whatever.
If they ever start making that X the "haha, got you" I'll have to start paying more attention. That'll suck.
Or the awkward auto coupon set up, which seems like it was designed to minimise the amount of money people were saving through codes. It's as if they realised "hang on, lots of people are using 30-40% off codes" so stuck a cheap 5% off one in my default. The user then has to deliberately remove the auto applied one to get the better offer, which is something many people won't bother to do. Or maybe I'm just overly suspicious, who knows.
Either way, they make the sites rather awkward to use.
For those wanting to go right to the source: http://darkpatterns.org/
It's been a race to the bottom ever since. Dave Egger's fine and breezy novel "The Circle" illustrates the ethical issues quite nicely.
Yes, that's the intention :(
Source: I used to be involved with a WiFi company that offered Facebook "login".
Edit: clarified my involvement
Unless you're Facebook, I guess: https://www.facebook.com/business/facebook-wifi
>After checking in, people will be asked if they also want to like your Page so you can continue to connect with them on Facebook.
Of course, if using Facebook WiFi, you do check-in to the location which triggers a host of other "features" within your Facebook account and experience. Similar to if you check-in to a location with the standard Facebook App.
I can see the argument that it's an extension of that experience, while providing WiFi service in exchange for it.
There's also http://socialwifi.com, not sure if they provide an option to spam the user's timeline or not.
This is a service provided by Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/business/facebook-wifi
The fact that this is even possible makes me feel like I'm in the middle ages.
I did not read the fine print, but made the mistake of thinking that it was a partnership with USPS and did not incur extra fees (like a crazy $13 monthly fee, even if you're not using the service).
By the time I discovered that, I also discovered that you can sign up on line, but you have to cancel by phone (or "being on hold", I discovered it).
Seriously. Never stamps.com.
* Anything that isn't first class mail can be accommodated by USPS.com, Paypal and others.
* If you mail enough letters to justify a label printer, you can get a better deal on a meter.
* If you hate going to the post office, you can spend the same money that you spend on Stamps.com bullshit to buy a bunch of stamps from the post office, which are now good forever.
My mom fell into this trap a few years ago. The easiest way to disengage: Use a good credit card like Amex. Call twice, hold for 60 seconds, hang up. Dispute the charge. Do this 2-3x.
Even PayPal does first class mail too! and they allow you to buy shipping for non-ebay packages too! And the rates are better than stamps.com.
I too can't understand stamps.com other than to fool people who don't know better. I signed up for their free trial in order to get a $10 postage scale and cancelled right away. I got to talk to a human who tried to convince me why I needed it. I was like "ebay/paypal/amazon/usps are cheaper."
It used to be common for record clubs, book clubs, magazine subscriptions etc.
Fill in this bank debit form, get two months trial subscription, if you do nothing we'll charge you 14 months for your first year and your trial period. (The more reputable places would give a genuine free trial,but it wasn't uncommon for the trial to be charged).
And none of my banks offer this that I know of? If they do, the UX certainly isn't anything like this.
Citibank and Bank of America (and their subsidiary FIA Card Services) are the big ones who currently offer this service and there's a whole host of other third party services as well some big names and some small names.
AMEX discontinued theirs in 2004, Discover discontinued theirs in 2011, reinstated it, and then discontinued it again in 2015, PayPal's Virtual Debit Card discontinued in 2010.
They don't provide much use because you probably would have better luck disputing the auto charge with your credit card company anyways. They don't offer any additional fraud protection and they may not work as you expect. Additionally taking away auto-payment to a service you signed up for doesn't actually cancel the service, you still have to unsubscribe. You may actually still owe them money depending on what you signed up for.
I used to use them a lot. My favorite feature was that you not only got a one-time number, but you could set a limit for it so you couldn't be overcharged. Great for ordering stuff from shady web sites.
Well, it was my favorite feature until I did that with a shady web site and got overcharged. I called my bank to ask WTF, and they said they automatically padded the limit by 10% because people are idiots and forget to account for shipping charges and such.
I did get my money back after fighting with the scammers for a while. Threatening them with a chargeback tends to bring them to their senses.
I've been thinking of writing a simple add-on just to get rid of that annoying "Get to Google Faster" box Google puts on every search result if Google isn't your default search engine. (Google is my default search engine, but because I have their tracking blocked, their web site doesn't know this.)
Companies that do this sort of crap may not win much by it in the long run. One of the reasons for Amazon's success is easy order cancellation. That's what makes one-click ordering work. Their innovation was not that you can order with one click; it's that you can easily undo a one-click order. That makes it a safe feature for consumers. Most businesses still don't get this.
Anyway. I'm a designer and my work has even featured on his site (after he did some freelancing with us - cheeky begger). His implication that people like me sit around trying to making life harder for customers is complete bollocks. We don't. Businesses just don't. It's bad business and nobody would willing do it.
Usually (and I grant their might be a tiny number of exceptions) they have to do things crappily because of constraints beyond their control. It may seem malicious to the likes of a freelance design-and-run merchant like Brignull, but it's not. It can also just be clueless visual designers wanting to make things pretty at the expense of being usable. But mostly it's just hidden constraints.
But hey who cares. It's good rant material.
But the claim that no one is intentionally annoying/scamming customers is a bit of a joke. Good businesses don't, and mistakes happen, but a lot of the entries on that site are obviously, consistently screwing their customers (RyanAir, anyone?) There are, in fact, entire businesses that exist to screw unsuspecting customers with rollover billing, data sales, and opt-outs. Among other things, if you're extracting value from customers once each and they don't know your company name, there isn't any consequence to mistreating them.
Broadly, I see three things on that site. There are failures of design and constraint, but there are also dark patterns (where you're basically sincere, but manipulating people with things like opt-outs), and a fair amount of straight-up abuse (where you have victims instead of customers).
I would love to check a new website against this list, and I would also spend my expensive time to add to this list to report dark pattern websites as they upset me enough to take action.
… or fill the issue tracker with troubleshooting requests, demands that someone else code something they think needs to exist, long rants about whether something should or should not be included, etc. Open source maintenance is far from free.
As a community we tend to neglect this side of things since it's neither a fun technical problem nor something a one-time effort can fix, but it deprives the open-source world of too many good developers.
As a counter, for those looking to create GOOD UI and UX or want to try and avoid unintentionally bad designs, I wholeheartedly recommend this video on UI tenets and traps: https://vimeo.com/168472466