Yes, they are popular and use carefully selected colors etc. but are horrible below the pretty paint.
I wish the page would mention the responsibility of designers to the end users of their work.
I'd recommend Mike Monteiro's "Broken by Design" to the authors of the page.
To be respectfully blunt "the responsibility of designers to the end users of their work."
No, it's our job to make the user's goals as seamless as possible - within the functional constraints of the business. If that business is to fuck users privacy over, we must operate within that overarching environment or GTFO.
To be clear, I dont understand how conscientious UXer's function at a place like Facebook, unless the plot of Servance is a reality?
This goes for developers and data folks as well (everyone), so not like designers are being targeted.
Let's unpack this one for a second.
First, the idea of dark patterns in UI/UX is a relatively new concept, so the ethics are naturally going to get muddy. So pretending to be handy wavy about "just be ethical" is not fair to UX/UI people.
Let's take an example dark pattern of "are you sure you want to cancel" taking 3 modals to complete. Each modal tells you something about the app that you may not have. The UX'r does an A/B test and finds that only 23% finish cancelling after implementation of the 3-step modal. So to one user this is a nuisance having jump through 3 modals, but to another user they learned on modal #2 about a product feature they didn't know was possible and decided not to cancel.
Is the UX'r morally wrong for putting in the 3-modal even though in one case it was a nuisance and in another it was beneficial?
What if the person was cancelling and was never given the opportunity to know there was a potential benefit? The ethical thing would also be to completely delete all of their data (including their login). They now come back and you say "sorry we can't restore all of your data, you need to start over". Didn't you just create (1) a bad UX and (2) a new dark pattern?
Again, my point isn't whether the 3-modal pattern is a dark pattern, but rather that dark patterns are incredibly difficult to define, are novel and thus require nuance when determining their ethical ramifications.
You still didn't address this? Care to elaborate on what the "honest" path is here?
1) Have one confirmation that explains the situation clearly (≤ 3 bullets) and avoids fat fingers, such as disallow input for three seconds.
Github delete repo flow is reasonably similar.
Also, if you want to inform folks of features they might not know about, waiting until the are about to cancel is probably a bad design. And needing three modal boxes to inform them is absolutely a dark pattern and unethical.
It's a conceptual example with an entirely plausible outcome. No need to scrutinize it any further than that.
> And needing three modal boxes to inform them is absolutely a dark pattern and unethical.
How do you conclude "absolutely a dark pattern" if even one person realizes benefit from it? My point is precisely this - there are no absolute ethics when it comes to dark patterns.
That's the wrong way to think about Dark Patterns. It's not about whether they are ever helpful, but whether they are ever harmful. It doesn't matter what your intentions are, it matters how the end user experiences the design. 3 modal boxes to cancel is absolutely harmful when it can be done in 1 and that 1 modal can even include all the reasons you shouldn't cancel. But you get one shot to keep a customer, not three tries to keep and frustrate them.
And I have personally given up on cancellation before because it was too complicated/long/frustrating. So yea, dark patterns are real, they are not ethical, and you shouldn't defend them.
This is why we can't have a good faith discussion, because you think I'm defending dark patterns. I'm not. I'm simply asking how the designer determines what is a dark pattern that unilaterally has bad ethical ramifications.
> 3 modal boxes to cancel is absolutely harmful when it can be done in 1 and that 1 modal can even include all the reasons you shouldn't cancel. But you get one shot to keep a customer, not three tries to keep and frustrate them.
I would argue even 1 modal is too much. Why can't I just click the "CANCEL MY ACCOUNT" button? Isn't a modal that says "TYPE YOUR ORGANIZATION NAME TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION" in hostile to the user? How do you ensure people don't accidentally cancel and then want to reactive with all of their old data? and...and..etc.
Do you see why the interpretation of "this is a dark pattern" is almost entirely up to the user perception and has varying degrees of difficulty to the parse as the designer?
The idea that we can never know what is truly unethical is solipsism, maybe with a little sophism thrown in. While an interesting thought experiment, it doesn't support real world needs very well.
A concrete plan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31995084
Relative to what? Before the web?
I left one of the first technologies companies I had ever worked for (huge name more than 20 years ago) specifically because they were using dark patterns. Not even in web UI, but in their installer for actual software (which was to be used in conjunction with the web). Specifically, swapping default and representative checkbox states. You know, the "now that we've set them up to uncheck for opting out, we'll show the next box unchecked and the user has to check it to opt-out" trick.
Seems unfair to call out UX designers when everyone who contributes to Facebook's mission is as culpable.
Fully ethical work that puts dinner on the table is a rare luxury, unfortunately. In the meantime, there are many rationalizations to choose from. I imagine a popular one at Facebook is something about the ends justifying the means.
Come on now!
NOBODY else pays 400k minimums for senior level roles. But 150-200k is common for non MANGA and that’s more than enough in the USA in most places. But you can’t buy both a Plaid and a big house at the same time, and fund many luxury hobbies if you go down that path.
All I’m saying is.. be real :)
> No, it's our job to ...
To be respectfully more blunt, it seems naïve to assume responsibility and job overlap completely in a world with Facebooks, et Al, unless we're wilfully abandoning ethics (or have interesting political views).
Of course, in a remarkably short amount of time, Facebook threw away that goodwill by chasing "engagement" at any and all costs.
Personally, I would not have praised Facebook as a model for great design even in 2012, but it's more understandable in that historical context.
Paradoxically, Amazon's design may work well for Amazon itself. The company is simply so different from other ecommerce sites that what's good for Amazon is not good for normal sites.[0]
[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/amazon-no-e-commerce-role-m...