Dark Patterns: good for business?
swombat.com
swombat.com
Once I figured it out I was amazed at the ingenuity.
I would never do that, but hell, I have to admit it was tempting. If you had a 1% conversion rate, and then you used other dark patterns to drive 100K users to the site? It could run into a million or more dollars easily.
I'm not a perfect angel. I just don't want to live with being the type of person that had to do that. I'd rather be poorer and have less emotional baggage. After all, in life you end up doing a lot of stuff you don't like anyway. No point adding to it yourself just for a few bucks. As long as you're able to eat, live, grow, and survive, the extra money isn't worth the guilt.
So yes, I can understand why some folks do this. Hell, I know people that do things like this. I've just decided I'm not one of them.
Ethics, morality, and the law aside, I think this is a personal choice about who you are more than anything else.
Having said all of that, remember that it's easy to say things like I just said. Makes you look good. Makes you feel all moral and superior. Many times it's a lot harder to actually live it. I can say it basically because it's just inaction on my part. If somebody set it all up and asked me to push the big red button and nobody would know it was me? Not as easy.
I think it also reflects on fundamental competence. "Quick and dirty" answers seem to me to be favored by people who don't have the wherewithal to do things right and are unable and/or unwilling to develop it. It's the only means for some people to "get ahead". So, to me, "ethics" is also an indicator of competence, which might be one of the best arguments I can come up with for eschewing folks with shady ethics and preferring to do business with folks who are very above-board/white-hat: If they have to resort to such measures to make their money, what other corners are they cutting because they aren't able to do things right?
$0.02
Zynga makes a perfect example of one of those businesses that really abuse dark patterns, btw. And they are surviving the reputational damage just fine, since most of their users don't seem to care about their reputation, or aren't savvy enough to figure it out.
I like to think of it this way: I want to do everything to make a "perfect" site. It loads quickly, it's easy to use, it's clear in its intent, it does one thing and does it well. As I put together the site, I try to keep it as clean and simple as possible. No surprises for the user.
These are just good design principles, dark patterns aside. There's also this huge "don't be evil" new-age kind of feel-good philosophy that folks use, but to me it's much more practical than that: I want as good a site as possible.
Once you start trying to engineer the user, even if it's in their best interests, to me the design suffers. And I'm not sure there is a natural stopping point once you start down this road. At least I can't find one.
My personal feeling is that that there is going to be a huge backlash against sites manipulating users. Not sure what form it will take, but it's coming.
I think that's way across the line but it actually is legal in plenty of places. How do you feel about such an operation ?
And, when a pattern refines or combines existing patterns, how do you prefer them be entered? For example, 'Hidden Costs' and 'Price Comparison Prevention' are often combined, lowering a advertised price or interest rate by moving charges into other later or less-prominently-displayed fees.
What percentage of SaaS trial users forget to cancel?
That's always fallen into my "slightly shady" camp, but I can say with some authority that it's a huge needle-mover in terms of revenue.
So they'll pay to dollar for really bad stuff such as site take-overs, pop-unders and so on. All the stuff we hate. But it works wonders for them, they have the figures to prove it.
Once you cross over in to things like gambling then the additional penalty of using a 'dark' pattern seems a minor one.
It's a line that you can set for yourself and decide to not cross and play nice, or if you are very money motivated you can explicitly decide to cross it.
But once you do, what's next? The lines between 'nice' and 'not so nice' are pretty vague, but the one between 'legal' and 'not legal' is a much clearer one and I fear that people that no longer distinguish between 'nice' and 'not so nice' will eventually be unable to distinguish between 'legal' and 'illegal'.
It all seems to be related to a sense of entitlement, and the people that I see practicing 'dark' patterns to further their business interests all suffer from this to a greater or lesser extent.
If you look at how people like Bill Gates and others made huge fortunes on the back of business practices that are not exactly ethical are perceived you could easily fall i nto the perception that as long as you make enough money you'll be forgiven, but that should not be the whole story.
I'm not making a judgement as to whether you personally should build a business that uses dark patterns, my point is that in some lines of business, dark patterns are a critical survival factor, and if you try to be too "good" in those types of business you will get trampled by someone who's willing to squeeze every penny.
If you only have one life to live, would you rather go through it being a good person and slightly less rich, or a complete annoying jerk and slightly more rich?