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Others can correct me, but I don't think that's an example of a dark pattern.

Intrusive, maybe, but a dark pattern is 'deceit by design' whereas what you're describing seems to me 'being slightly annoying by design', which is a totally different thing.

Thinking about Exit Intent and how to optimize for it is a fairly well established part of online eCommerce. I think you made the wrong choice and your boss was probably right to be annoyed with you. It's within their prerogative to decide what user experience they offer to their users. And obviously, it's also yours to quit, but if you do so based on a poor understanding of what a dark pattern is, you're just hindering yourself.

Definitely a dark pattern, for the record.

if you can provide a source I'll be glad to see it. I checked multiple lists of dark patterns before posting.

The user wants to leave the site. The site stops them from leaving. That sounds pretty dark to me.

Just because something is "a fairly well established part of online eCommerce" doesn't mean it is not a shitty thing to do.

'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

First - the site doesn't stop them from leaving.

Second - I didn't say it's not shitty.

I wouldn't normally nit pick on terms but this is a conversation about words and their definitions.

Dark Patterns are a deliberate attempt to defraud or deceive through the use of UI.

There are many things that are shitty - country music for one - that are not dark patterns.

Just because you and I both don't like exit intent popups, doesn't make them something that should be criminalised.

Dark Patterns describe activity that either is or should be criminal. The difference is enormous.

> Thinking about Exit Intent and how to optimize for it is a fairly well established part of online eCommerce.

Just because something is institutionalized doesn't mean it's right. Especially when that institution is eCommerce, one of the most manipulative industries in software.

I would ammend your description of dark patterns to "Deciept and manipulation by design" to see this through the lens most people do.

It's close. The user wants to close the page, and you nag them again - with a deal that you could already have given them if you were honest.

"Don't go! I can change!"

Sadly it works too often in relationships as well as ecommerce.

Spoiler: no change is forthcoming.

When everything is annoying by design it becomes a mental tax on everyone using the web. It might not be a dark pattern, but it is asshole design. Neither of which anyone should tolerate or defend.

Some websites optimize exit intent by breaking the back button. Some malls optimize for it by making themselves difficult to navigate. It may not be a dark pattern to you, because you know how it works, but it might influence another person. I hope there will always be engineers and designers who refuse to implement them.

why does google allow them to abuse 'breaking the back button' by hijacking your history and overwriting it with the their website?

This should not be possible, it's a horrible jarring experience every time it happens to me when I click a questionable link and try to go back to the previous page.

> Intrusive, maybe, but a dark pattern is 'deceit by design' whereas what you're describing seems to me 'being slightly annoying by design', which is a totally different thing.

This is not a totally different thing. Both are examples of coercive/deceptive behavior. That makes them the same sort of thing, but differing by degree.

> if you do so based on a poor understanding of what a dark pattern is, you're just hindering yourself.

I expect that they refused to implement it because it was a practice they felt was bad ethically rather than because it matched some industry definition.

>Intrusive, maybe, but a dark pattern is 'deceit by design' whereas what you're describing seems to me 'being slightly annoying by design', which is a totally different thing.

We'll call it shitty pattern if you dislike dark pattern.

fine. Dark patterns involve a deliberate attempt to defraud/deceive. Expanding the definition is not helpful.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there a pretty big difference between a "moral compromise" and a modal to entice a potential customer to buy? I'm not clear on how enticement even comes close to being a "dark pattern" as I understand the term.

When someone tries to navigate away they wanted to stop them. A real world analogue would be if I tried to leave a store and someone blocked my way to try and make me buy something.

That's insane behavior, I don't owe your business or site anything, least of all my time. Those are the kindest words I can find for that behavior.

But assuming it’s just a div that appears when you mouse off at the top, it doesn’t actually do anything to stop them. It’s not outrageous for a shopkeeper to say “don’t go!” or something like that as you’re leaving.

It’s annoying and tacky but it’s not analogous to being held hostage.

In the olden days, a website could pop up a dialog box that would lock browser interaction til it was dealt with. It was abused. A lot. This was way prior to 2012 tho.

2012. A modal dialog was probably a javascript alert(), which at the time was model for the whole browser and would prevent navigation until dismissed.

I just tested with an older version of firefox (10.0, released January 31, 2012), and it had non-modal alert() dialogs.

You've never seen this? When someone clicks to close a browser tab you can stop the tab from closing by adding a handler to the onbeforeunload() event.

And that can be bypassed by closing the tab again.

Yup, pretty terrible.

>A real world analogue would be if I tried to leave a store and someone blocked my way to try and make me buy something.

That'd depend on the implementation behavior. If it's using window.onbeforeunload, yeah I guess it's kind of like someone blocking you when you try to leave, although you can easily walk around them (on most browsers if you try to close the tab and the modal shows up, and you try to close the tab again it will override the modal). However, there's also another type where it tracks the location of your cursor, and shows a popup when it leaves the content area (indicating that your mouse is going to close the tab or go back). In that case it's not really blocking anything, and much more analogous to a salesperson saying "before you go" as you're walking out the door.

Either of these behaviors is equivalent to someone standing in front of the door and trying to harass me when I leave.

Which is a solid ‘no thanks, not coming here again’ from me.

> much more analogous to a salesperson saying "before you go" as you're walking out the door.

I would try to avoid going back to that store.

I would never go back to that store and I would tell my friends not to shop there.

While I agree, do remember that some patterns can and do extend to the physical.

Many stores do indeed make it hard to leave without buying, for example by having no direct route to the exit: you have to squeeze through the tills awkwardly. It's probably in the name of loss prevention, but it's also a disincentive to leave without a purchase.

Actually, nearly everything about a supermarket is carefully designed for extracting money from you, from product placement, to layout, need to have a loyalty card to access discounts, even perhaps having discounts in the first place (as opposed to selling at a lower regular price), multipacks driving food and packaging waste, etc etc etc.

Best Buy used to do something similar in their retail stores to paying customers. A bouncer at the exit would usually stop people and check receipts against the merchandise they were leaving with. It's a great way for a company to show that it has no trust for its customers and that it hopes they don't come back.

>isn't there a pretty big difference between a "moral compromise" and a modal to entice a potential customer to buy?

well the difference is that you've used more fancy words in the second description. Reminds me of the joke

"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."

Imagine when trying to exit any retail business you had an employee stop you at the door with an offer.

Exit popups don't stop you. You simply get an extra offer. You can proceed to click (x) - it's not hidden etc.

>Exit popups don't stop you.

You mean don't ultimately prevent you. But they absolutely do temporarily stop you.

Respect and volition, mainly.

If a customer is attempting to leave and you bar their exit, you've demonstrated a willful contempt of their wishes. It causes the customer stress and serves no purpose other than to show them that you can make them do as you please. It's a micro aggression, a type of violence.

Imagine a woman trying to leave a man's apartment as he holds the door closed. He reminds her she was the one who came inside and asks again, is she sure there's nothing she wants from him? He keeps his hand there until she says she's sure so she understands, he [i]let[/i] her leave.

I'm against either scenario for effectively the same reasons.

Thanks for taking a stand and sharing your experience. That takes bravery. And thanks for acknowledging that that is not always an option for all of us.

For each one of those "No"s there are probably so many half-hearted and exasperated "Ok"'s. In aggregate we get to the point we're at, one little water droplet at a time. I'm optimistic though, because the same force works the other way too.

There are some scummy sites that literally hijack your browser history and overwrite it with links to the current page you are on, so clicking the back arrow does nothing. This always gets under my skin as an extremely hostile dark pattern to keep me locked on their page against my will.

Has anyone experienced this obnoxious browser history hijacking in Chrome? How do they pull this off and how can we report it so it stops being exploited?

> Most notable the modal popups that come up moments after a page loads and you have started to read it. I back out immediately whenever I can but obviously I am in the minority, this bullshit must "work" on some level to have become so ubiquitous.

I fully agree with you here and if i could leave every site that did this I would be happier, but there are a couple that do this that I have little choice but to interact with:

- a hardware components website, pretty much the only good one in the UK that will ship individual parts, if you even move your mouse point towards the top right corner (this is also where the basket and login buttons live) up comes the model "Please don't leave" in big bold letters.

- a digital whiteboard used for work purposes, this one is a little more bad design than anything. if you login with an @example.com email address every so often instead of dropping you to the workspace you were hoping to get, it drops you to a page showing teams of other people from example.com, and a modal asking you if you are interested in getting more from the tool. This is most annoying when it's a customer meeting and one or two of your team get lost in this way (the links to get from the team page to the board is non-obvious, and if it's your turn to get the redirect, logging out and back in does not work)

During one customer call it happened to the security SME got caught by the value redirect (it was a security discussion I was facilitating, the security SME was the star of the show), not realising my mic was on I loudly shouted CRAP!. That's when I realised this is CRAP, the modal begging me not to leave, the redirects to show extra value, its all CRAP - Customer Retention by Annoying Popup and I hate it.

>I fully agree with you here and if i could leave every site that did this I would be happier, but there are a couple that do this that I have little choice but to interact with:

You can use ublock origin to block the modals / pop-ups. I did it for a lot of websites.

I found a new job after having to remove unsubscribe features and replace them with phone numbers to call at my first job out of college (among other questionable practices).

Even if we assume it's a dark pattern, don't you agree it's not your decision to reject it or not. The moral decision is the company/product team's. You can raise the points on why it shouldn't be done but straight away rejecting it is childish. End of the day they must have gotten it done with someone else and you would have done it anyway (as per your words) if financial situation isn't good.

Morals don't only kick in at a certain level of the management hierarchy, and some might argue that they drop off instead.

Childish, no. “They’ll just get someone else to do it if I don’t.”

It’s your responsibility to raise points, it’s your choice to accept that premise, swallow your spine and do it anyway.

Injury by spine swallowing is cumulative each one relatively harmless until it isn’t

"I was just following orders" was never a tight defense.

Modals are frustrating, but what I find truly appalling is the Uyghur slave labor that companies like Amazon profit from.

Actually it's customers like us who benefit from it. Amazons are just the facilitators. The comfort, the low cost, the ease….

> Amazons are just the facilitators.

The profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht.

https://www.geekwire.com/2021/see-worthy-first-look-jeff-bez...

>The profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht.

Source? That claim isn't supported anywhere in the geekwire article. It doesn't even talk about "labor", let alone "slave labor" or "Uyghur slave labor".

> Source? That claim isn't supported anywhere in the geekwire article. It doesn't even talk about "labor", let alone "slave labor" or "Uyghur slave labor".

There’s plenty of sources documenting Amazon’s profits from Uyghur slave labor. Here’s one:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/apple-amazon-sony-samsung...

The article claims "Amazon [...] benefiting from the forced labor of Uighur Muslims in China", but that really just translates into "amazon buys goods made from factories in reeducation camps in Xinjiang". That doesn't really contradict or refute what the parent poster said, which is that consumers are the ultimate benefactors (presumably from lower prices).

I suppose your claim that "profit that Bezos has realized from Uyghur slave labor is part of the reason he was able to buy a half billion dollar yacht" is technically true, but that's more due to weasel wording than anything else. The sentence gives an impression that one of the reasons why bezos could buy the yacht was because of Uighur labor, but strictly speaking the "profit" could be anywhere between one cent to half a billion dollars.

It’s not even “amazon buys goods from labor camps in Xinjiang” rather it is “amazon allows sellers on their platform from China who could be reselling goods from labor camps in Xinjiang.” Or it could just be a normal furniture factory in Changji (a city near Urumqi).

Factories in Guangzhou (where a lot of electronics have been made) have been using Uighur labor for a few decades now, though supposedly they are migrant workers and it’s all non-forced (which I would tend to believe, in the way that government arranged labor migrations are sort of dubious). If your trade school sets up an internship at a factory in another province, is it forced labor or not? This applies to Hans as much as it does to Uighurs, so the claims in the article come off as a bit strange.

At the risk of the perception that I'm making a false equivalence or reducing the importance of being mindful of the types of suffering you point out (I don't intend that, and I'm as outraged by the problem you mentioned), but it's ok to tend to your own garden. In fact, that's where we can sometimes make the impacts that occasionally tip the system over. The more we try, the luckier we get.

I don’t disagree, but I find myself wondering is it morally better to develop the modal and to not use Amazon instead?

Both are morally deficit. It's a difference of degrees, not kind, and both are reprehensible.

Agreed

I find it very weird to blame Amazon for the crimes of the Chinese government.