Types of Deceptive Design
deceptive.design
deceptive.design
Just encountered this in a major way trying to cancel my Audible subscription - searched for 10-15 mins on both the app and mobile web, there’s an option to temporarily pause, but could not for the life of me figure out how to actually cancel my subscription. Maybe there’s a way on desktop web?
Regardless, pure sleaze tactic, and whenever I encounter it, I definitely never come back, and am sure to give terrible word of mouth. I’m going to cancel anyways, why ruin my perception of your product on the way out?
On that note, if you dislike sleazy dark patterns, stay away from Audible.
What, having to confirm 6 times in a row is a dark pattern now? heh.
Amazon.com is pretty bad at this too.
"oh, and you have 3 remaining logins (not attempts, logins) before we need something extra from you"
I don't remember what that something extra was (probably more personal info), only that I didn't stick around once I transferred away my domain name. Used up all three logins to do it, too.
> You get into a situation very easily, but then you find it is hard to get out of it (e.g. a premium subscription).
Now, maybe the US version is different, and uses dark patterns, but for me it seems very easy.
Ultimately, I think it might work as he says, but the metrics just showed a drop in 'engagement' cause people would close the page without clicking, so we had to add the button back up because the higher-ups thought 'engagement' was more important.
If users were able to fast forward and see the whole workflow, and what will be asked for on later pages, many would not even start.
Without a very good technical reason there should be a first page overview or summary of all information the process will require. Any contractual data should legally be offered up front.
Of note, an audio-book publisher called Findaway really pissed me off. It took me many hours to fill in their workflow, and only on the last page was I able to read the actual contract. At the end, after a blank page IIRC, was a lonely clause assigning rights to Apple to use my voice recordings for training their machine learning. I emailed the company and told then this was unacceptable. They sheepishly suggested I could just sign the contract and then "opt out" of distributing with Apple. Needless to say that was the end of that conversation and my interest in Findaway. I had to take the hit of losing several hours of my time.
Ecommerce: "Timed" offers or "low/limited" stock for FOMO, fake customer reviews for validation - outright made up (Shopify) or from another product (Amazon), real-time "purchases" ticker, priming, etc.
[1] Dark patterns list: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27328863
Below is an example of Disney using priming for deceptive marketing - these are used in ecommerce in a diff. manner
If you watched the movie, you know that it has nothing to do with the other Avengers, yet this ad makes imprints Avenger's images at the start to increase the probability of people watching the film. PS: The end was just to gather interest for a sequel
[2] Shang-Chi promo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pgdfDDdYpo
[3] Priming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)
Maybe I can't see the deception because I'm not privy to what makes an Avenger and Avenger, but it seems like from the movies I've seen an Avenger is typically a superhero in the Marvel comic universe.
They are technically showing other superheros in the Marvel comic universe. I hadn't heard of Shang-chi, but apparently they show up for the first time in a Marvel comic in '73.
So... I get that Disney as a whole is a company that uses dark patterns and therefore has lost the good faith 'we don't use dark patterns' moral heirarchy, but I'm not sure I think that this deceptive marketing has a huge difference.
I could very well be wrong, I wonder what the populations of Avengers fans but not Marvel fans is compared to Avengers and Marvel fans is.
Plus, depending on your interpretation, it might sound like Shang Chi is a combination or is more powerful than its "predecessors": "made us who we are today"
The key with priming is that it occurs subtly, without the viewer suspecting its effect on later actions - serving the purpose of a deception, under fans' noses
I kinda feel like if you know enough about Marvel to know that that line can refer to the Avengers, you also know enough about Marvel, to know that it doesn't.
I have never seen an Avenger Movie, and I couldn't see this tied in more or less with other Marvel movies than ... I don't know. That one with the black thing that looks like Spawn?
I never read the comics, it is more objective that way. Maybe you mean Deadpool...
> it has nothing to do with the other Avengers
_Yet_. If you've watched any of the other MCU movies you can easily predict that Shang-Chi will be part of the next lineup of the Avengers. They give you the impression that you will get a Marvel Avenger origin story, and that's what the movie delivers. Nothing deceptive about that. (Apart from that it also has plot connections to Iron Man 2.)
Replied above, the difference is subtle and barely noticeable if you don't pay attention - being a fan is a bias.
The problem is enforcement. Don't expect anything to change until companies get fined out of existence.
> The problem is enforcement. Don't expect anything to change until companies get fined out of existence.
Smaller companies will certainly continue but Microsoft’s LinkedIn could receive a sizable fine.
We had a couple of bags that were slightly overweight, one by 5 lbs, one by 2 lbs. Often they will let these small overages slide, especially for high “status” frequent flyers such as moi.
This time the desk agent sentenced us to $100 per bag. With a long line of people behind us, my traveling companion became flustered and said “just pay it”.
I said “No way, it’s pure rent seeking, which they only do when they think you’ll be flustered in front of a crowd. We have an unused baggage allowance, which they could apply to an average weight. They choose to set a high enough penalty that I will seek options. In this case, let’s calmly and deliberately extract the spare fold-up duffel I always carry, shift a few items from both bags, and spend the $200 on champagne and caviar in Paris.”
This was a winning argument, and it was done.
I suppose I could carry a small luggage scale, but they are hardly accurate. Hotels, airports, rental car counters, etc., could provide more accurate ones, but they don’t usually. I usually fly with only carry-on, so it’s not in my sights.
The check-in agent went from “beleaguered jobsworth” to “chuckling co-conspirator” once I explained what was really going on here.
If someone is an insider and can explain convincingly why a slightly heavy bag places a $100 burden on the baggage handling system, I will retract.
As a pricing decision maker for a deadline driven product, we always create a ramp at the end rather than stand up a brick wall. In this case, they could have set a lower fee for the first 5 or 10 lbs over, and I would very likely have paid two $25 fees. By going straight to punitive, no way.
What do we call this practice in the context of the OP? How about “public shaming for minor infractions”? Feh.
IIRC, at a specific weight special handling kicks in; not sure if it’s union or OHSA rules but it becomes a two person job.
That doesn’t cost $100, sure, but some of that fee is, as you noted, a deterrent rather than raw cost passed along.
I have a cheap one that's basically an LCD display in a handle with a loop you put on the real handle, and then lift the bag up. It has always seemed plenty good enough, and I've never been accidentally over the limit at the check-in counter.
i guess you could put it as a kind of "taking an action as implicit permission to perform another action", although its not really implicit
You search for something, and then Quora takes that as an invitation to send you a bunch of spam. To make it worse, it seems impossible to control/prevent this through account settings. Opt-out doesn’t work. It got so bad I had to just completely block all email from quora.com.
I still avoid clicking Quora links in search results because of this, even though I’ve blocked email from them. I guess it is a grudge.
The bad thing is, I used to be active on Quora and enjoy its content, but something happened at some point a few years ago, where they became aggressively spammy.
I’m not sure if that’s a deceptive design or just a downright sleazy one.
I personally preferred 'dark patterns'.
This was back in the day, but I used to always go to IMDB to search for movie details. Inevitably, when I'd go to click on the search box, the site would suddenly get around to loading in a banner in the exact spot, pushing the search box down, and resulting in me inadvertently clicking the banner. I was almost certain it was by design.
Good examples include subscription cancellation call center scripts, Reddit's "please use the app" popup, and Twitter's auto-revert to algo timeline after you explicitly selected the revchron one.
And no email. They want you to twitter at them. Lol, kids.