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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> Professional ethics are a thing. "I was just following orders" not a valid excuse.

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?

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The obvious ethical alternative is to make it an easy process to cancel and an easy process to renew and restore cancelled accounts.

> an easy process to renew and restore cancelled accounts.

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.

It's not difficult at all, when you understand the workflow and are honest with the user about the ramifications. If honesty is difficult, that is the problem.

> Didn't you just create (1) a bad UX and (2) a new dark pattern?

You still didn't address this? Care to elaborate on what the "honest" path is here?

0) Do a better job so more folks understand the benefits.

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.

_Eventual_ total deletion is ethical, yes, but having a grace period after cancellation where data is temporarily retained is both obvious and established practice.

| the idea of dark patterns in UI/UX is a relatively new concept

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.

The term was only coined ~12 years ago...

But attempting to cheat your customer is old as time.

Yes. You've drawn a conclusion about motive without supporting evidence. You don't know why people quit trying to cancel, it could be that they became so frustrated with the cancellation process that they gave up.

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.

> You've drawn a conclusion about motive without supporting evidence.

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.

> How do you conclude "absolutely a dark pattern" if even one person realizes benefit from it?

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.

> 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?

No, just use your brain and make a decision. Does that mean you'll always be correct, never mistaken? No again. That's when you drop the mea culpa.

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

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