How Dark Patterns can improve your conversion rates but damage your brand. | Hacker News Reader

How Dark Patterns can improve your conversion rates but damage your brand.

90percentofeverything.com

46 pointsharrybr23 comments

Good point, though I would argue (and have argued here: http://swombat.com/2010/12/19/dark-patterns-good-for-busines...) that in some business sectors, like, for example, the ultra-competitive registrar market, dark patterns are a necessity. If you don't use them you will go bankrupt. So before you discard dark patterns, make sure you're in a business that can afford to do so.

Also, things that were considered dark patterns in other types of businesses (e.g. supermarkets), like laying out the shop in a way that will encourage you to buy more stuff, are now considered standard business practice. Will that happen to these patterns too?

I'd argue that if you can't make money without tricking people, you shouldn't be in that particular branch of business.

You can argue that all you want, but Ryanair, which epitomises the application of dark patterns in every aspect of its operations, is the largest or second-largest carrier in the world on a number of metrics (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair).

If you want to tell them they shouldn't be in the airline business, sure, but I'm not quite sure what your argument is then.

My argument is "dark patterns bad, don't work on bad stuff", not "dark patterns don't work". Yes, some people will ignore the "bad" part and get rich doing so. That's not the only way to earn a living, though.

And I as a customer am happy to have Ryanair, Airasia and other low cost carriers like those. Even if they do use dark patterns, they provide me with possibilities I didn't have before they appeared...

I have never been a customer of Ryanair. How difficult is it to navigate their dark patterns?

Can I be a customer without getting entangled?

It's not very difficult, you just have to be careful when filling the forms, they are a bit confusing...

For example to refuse the travel insurance policy you must choose that you don't want it in the country selection box...

Personally while I find it irritating, I find godaddy much worse and since unlike Ryanair they have cheap competitors without dark pattern I avoid them.

You will probably get caught out the first time or two - they charge you a cheap up front price but then add lots of little charges for all kinds of extras (luggage, checkin, that kind of thing). Once you know the system it works well.

People were saying that about Yahoo, you can't make money without pop-ups, etc. before Google came along

Google didn't win because of their lack of popups, they won because of their massively superior search engine and revolutionary advertising business model.

What's your revolutionary improvement in the domain name registrar market?

If Google had pop-ups I would never have used it, ever. I probably wouldn't even have used it if it had any image-based ads, the banners and such that yahoo was making a killing on.

The primary reason I started using google was its speed, simplicity, and the fact that it put search results I wanted exactly where I expected them. It felt good to use Google. It did not feel good to use search sites where half my time using it was spent downloading image files for advertisements.

What's your revolutionary improvement in the domain name registrar market?

That's a good question and I suspect if someone can implement an answer they'll get very rich.

A key factor would be marketing their trustworthiness. In a market where dark patterns are rampant, a reputation of being "the one company that doesn't suck ass" can be very valuable.

He doesn't need to have a revolutionary improvement to make his point. The point is that reliance on "dark patterns" or thinking that they are a necessity is a sign of lack of innovation. You can't assume that no other solution exists just because you've failed to come up with one.

I remember when I switched to Google. For me, the lack of popups was another big win.

A clutter-free interface for Google was a big win for me. Yahoo had become a bloated mess by that point.

For an honest, reliable and competitive registrar, have a look at Gandi: http://en.gandi.net/

Uh, can anyone explain what Dark Patterns are?

It's not explained on the page, and while it may be explained if you want to sit through the slideshow I'd rather know what it's about before I start listening to some Englishman drone on about it.

Haha, fair point! I'm the droning Englishman giving the presentation. If you'd rather read than listen, check out the http://darkpatterns.org - it's a public wiki that I curate. Here's the definition of Dark Patterns from the site:

"Dark Patterns are User Interfaces that are designed to trick people. Normally when you think of bad design', you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind."

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

(And I apologise for the "droning" remark, I actually only listened to the first half sentence of what you had to say -- I wasn't expecting to hear a voice when I clicked on the "next slide" button -- so I'm not qualified to judge your speaking voice...)

Hey Harry-

Just a quick note for your wiki, since I don't want to make Yet Another Account... on the Misdirection page: http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Misdirection

You mention ExpertsExchange has now hidden their information, and give this page as an example: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Applications/MS_Office/Excel...

But check this out: plug the URL into Google: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&...

Click "cached": http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WHOsXsX...

And then scroooooooooll again like before. There's the answers!

They don't want to lose the Google juice, so they change the contents of the page so that Google sees it all, and regular people don't. You can also change your UA string to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) and it works...

That was a very good presentation, reminds me to continue to work more towards allowing user interaction without requiring registration.

Use of dark patterns is lazy and unsustainable.

TL:DR - Don't trick your users.

I love the way Google Autocomplete serves as a window into the raw sentiments of the masses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com