Stop Calling These Dark Design Patterns or Dark UX | Hacker News Reader

Stop Calling These Dark Design Patterns or Dark UX

uxdesign.cc

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How about calling it fraud? :P

fraud: n. A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

There's a subreddit with the same name that calls out these kind of techniques if you're hungry for more examples.

https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/

Why not? It seems like a pretty good term to me. They are design patterns and they have bad intentions.

This article is essentially saying "Stop using this term, I don't like it."

The author is a bit late to the party as well, the terms have been around for at least 4 or 5 years.

He's saying the crime is worse than the punishment. The term is too soft compared to what they're doing.

I guess I disagree that "asshole design" is less bad than "dark pattern". The implication with the term dark pattern is that you are being evil. An asshole is just someone that's annoying or selfish, but being evil means intentionally malicious.

> Have you noticed that lately some people are trying to coin the terms "Dark UX" or "Dark Design Patterns"?

I think that "Dark Patterns" is a pretty well established terminology by now. I was effortlessly able to find a reference from five years ago:

https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-ins...

I think the argument he's trying to make is that "dark UX" can easily be assumed to be "dark colored" instead of "evil/nasty/deceitful".

And I tend to agree, I had to momentarily consider what the phrase meant, because I hadn't heard it in a long time. (not that I thought it was a color reference, I knew what it meant)

Maybe "Deceitful UX/Design Patterns" or "Conman UX/Design Patterns" would be more effective as phrase to accurately and quickly transfer meaning. This is a simple marketing issue.

If a term has already been around for a long time, you're probably going to confuse more people by trying to change it than you'll help by making it more intuitive. Also, the use of darkness as a metaphor for evil has been common in English for centuries - think of the "Dark Side" in Star Wars, saying "Dark Lord" to mean Satan, Sauron or some other fiendish character, etc. And it shouldn't take much context to figure out whether someone is talking about deceptiveness or color when reading about user interfaces.

There are lots of terminologies that are even more obscure but still well-understood because they've been used for a long time:

- "core dump" (even though computers with core memory are only found in museums these days)

- "carriage return" (even though output devices don't have a moving part called a "carriage" anymore)

- "dialing a phone" (even though phones don't have dials anymore)

- The common use of a floppy disk-shaped icon to denote saving a file

>...you're probably going to confuse more people by trying to change it

Confuse who? Techies that already know what it is, or pointy-haired-bosses that make all the decisions? Give it a revolting, and undignified name, and maybe it will stop being used.

While I applaud this work going into giving this phenomenon a name so it can be shown the light. It needs a non-technical name to demonstrate how bad it is.

>There are lots of terminologies that are even more obscure but still well-understood because they've been used for a long time:

This is a new phrase, created around 2010 [0], the same year the site was registered [1]. You have a list of phrases, but none of them are proof we shouldn't change this one, because yours are all technical terms. Dark UI Pattern is clever phrase for a marketing problem, not a technical one. And "Dark pattern" is a very, very obscure and weak in meaning. Consider what is more effective at getting an instantly recognizable response:

  -Dark UI Pattern
  vs
  -Dirty Rotten Button Design

That's a crap name, but describes the situation much more accurately. It does matter to change the name if your intent is to describe that it's evil, deceptive and manipulative. Here's George Carlin talking about the BS of weak and impotent language. [3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

[1] https://darkpatterns.org/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n2PW1TqxQk

How can user experience possibly be dark in the literal sense? I can imagine dark UI being confusing in that way, but dark UX only has one sensible interpretation.

>...dark UX only has one sensible interpretation

I've been working in software for over 20 years, I can't name a single person outside of my industry that even knows what UX means or refers to. And if they did, they'd confuse "dark UX" with something other than "nefarious".

Despite this, everyone I have ever met that uses software HATES being tricked by their software or manipulated by it.

There is a real need for a term that communicates to the people that are being affected, and the word "dark" just doesn't cut it.

I'll agree that dark UX is shop talk, and when talking to users as opposed to colleagues you'll need to clarify. Maybe we need a new word for that use case, but just expanding the UX acronym should be workable.

Maybe we just need to start a poll and brain storm the idea out. (dreaming) I think this is a bad enough problem on software that it needs headlines (with properly shaming name to the activity) in major news sources globally to get the behavior to end.

If it stinks bad enough, no business would want to be associated with it.

What's wrong with calling the patterns "Dark Design Patterns"? I couldn't tell from the article, although those examples were pretty nasty, to be sure.

I think the point is we shouldn’t be polite about it.

Ahole is a more general category, including sloppiness, is why. For example: Blizzard's Hearthstone forces endless clicking by disabled people (and everyone else) to get through their cards collection (if you press "t" you won't go straight to cards starting with "t"), and doesn't allow you to turn off the flashing during play if you have epilepsy. Your decks are always presented in random order wasting enormous amounts of time, and on and on and on. These aren't dark patterns (deliberate way of manipulating or deceiving), it's just lazy uncaring Ahole design or pure idiocy. Be as ticked as you like at dark design, but please don't blur the words (conflate the concepts.)

Many of these examples are outright deceptive. But I always thought that when "dark patterns/dark UX" practices are discussed, people are referring to those practices that are not overtly deceptive, but yet come up very close to the line.

For a more forceful terminology, I would suggest perhaps re-appropriating a term from urban design: Hostile architecture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

Most of the ones shown in this article aren’t really the best examples of Dark Patterns IMO.

This trick Facebook Messenger uses to get your phone contacts is a good example of how bad these things really are: https://medium.com/@scf4/an-example-of-a-dark-pattern-in-fac...

As developers we should be refusing to build features like this.

I have to admit, 'dirty screen' trick is kind of genius. I haven't used a mobile device in years, never seen it in the wild.

Actually not such a genius way to get clicks on your ads. The bounce rate on their landing page must be pretty high. You want traffic to convert, not just any click.

I think it would depend on a lot of variables, if you're paying for impressions and not clicks it would make more sense.

If "Dark Pattern" is not strong enough a term, how about something like "Con Pattern"?

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