Dark Patterns - User Interfaces Designed to Trick People
darkpatterns.org
darkpatterns.org
Their entire business is predicated on steering you away from using your credit or debit card (better for you) to a direct bank withdrawal (better for them).
Bank withdrawals carry a risk of overdraft fees, have fewer consumer protections, and lack the rewards programs and other benefits of cards. But they cost less for PayPal. Merchants don't pay any less though -- it's how PayPal makes money.
Each and every time it defaults to bank withdrawals. You have to hit "Change" to select your card, every time. There's no way to change the default to your card. The only reason for this UI is to steer customers away from their best interests.
I had my bank account connected to PayPal once, but deleted the association a few years ago. Somewhat surprisingly in the modern world of phantom deletion, there's never been any sign of it reappearing or Paypal trying to use or access it for anything. Each Paypal purchase uses only my credit card with no accidental way to do anything else.
I'm surprised they don't allow people to transfer money to you (and then force you to connect your bank account to get the money).
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
It's literally a case of using UI to steer customers towards a method that's worse for customers and no better for merchants.
You're being hyperbolic, or don't know what predicated means. This defaulting to bank transfers is a relatively recent thing in their history; they've been profitable for more than 10 years without that. Their fees are also sufficient to make a profit on credit card transactions, so their business would not fail should everyone opt-out of paying by ACH.
There are reasons for PayPal to want you to use ACH over a credit card beyond simply increasing profits, too. They're just as much victims of credit card fraud as their merchants. It's the card networks' fault that almost anyone in the world can pick up a Visa/MasterCard card, use it to buy something on eBay, then charge back the payment after they get the item. PayPal's the one getting the chargeback, and they're not exempt from the card networks' requirements on maximum chargeback rates. It's an existential threat to their business, always has been.
I've had a paypal account since before Ebay bought them and they've always used sneaky user interface tricks to push customers into using bank transfers over credit cards. It was the first thing I noticed about them after signing up.
Your note on chargebacks supports my point: Paying by card is better for the consumer. PayPal's trick UI steers them away from that.
Credit Cards essentially cost paypal more. A more honest solution might be pricing in the cost of credit card transactions fees and chargeback/fraud risk to the customer. I have no doubt this would be bad for conversion rates. It introduces huge friction, going from 0 cost to small percentage costs.
The way they do it now allows users to segment themselves. If you have a strong preference for using credit cards, it's available. If not, well then paypal does. They choose if you don't.
It's like an opt out system. In a lot of cases, thats a good system. For example, I think organ donation should use that system.
You may just end up pulling all you hair out before you find a way to do so.
* Third line of text on the page: "You can see all of your recurring payments on the [My preapproved payments].". Clicked the link.
* Hair intact.
Of course, the polite way of handling subscriptions would be having a link to this page in the menu. Sort of like how there are links to all of the other things you can do.
Does this feature honestly not seem hidden to you compared to the other things you can do on PayPal?
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/29/4640308/dark-patterns-insi...
which is a nice introduction to Dark Patterns.
And apparently the darkpatterns.org site has been posted to HN previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347543
The URLs lexically match exactly, so I'm not sure why dupe detection failed here.
Dark UX: The Elements of The Video Gambling Experience
http://uxmag.com/articles/dark-ux-the-elements-of-the-video-...
>Behind the scenes, however, they engage in all kinds of “optimizations” that encourage gamblers to spend and play more without stopping or burning out.
>How do I know this? I have something to confess.
On http://darkpatterns.org/library/faraway_bill/
Next is listed first, followed by Previous.
On the "previous page": http://darkpatterns.org/library/disguised_ads/
It is listed as such Previous followed by Next. So when I got to the Disguied Ads page, I clicked the last link on the page expecting it to take me to the next page, instead it took me back to the previous page!
darkpatterns.org is a great resource for people in organizations needing a reference about what NOT to do.
I would be great to expand it to include dark patterns in software such as the Ask toolbar trick in the Java Oracle installer.
Wish I had the time to contribute to the project!
My suggestion: find a simpler tool to display your slideshow.
Otherwise: a pretty decent collection of horrors.
I'll also note I'm that guy who generally avoids shopping online if at all possible. I'll do a lot of online research, but prefer patronizing local stores if possible, and paying cash. Why? Because:
- You know what you're getting when you buy it.
- When the deal is done the deal is done. No late-hit fees or follow-on solicitations.
- Generally a much easier returns policy, should that be necessary.
Yes, for some items, there's less choice (though you can special order a great deal of stuff), and there are some things I will purchase online (air travel on the rare occasions I feel it utterly necessary to humiliate myself before airport security).
And it's not useful to be informed that your website won't work if a critical component is turned off. It just isn't.
I'd even go so far as to say that people who disable JavaScript should be ignored entirely.
It can be quite useful for someone to make a suggestion that can make the website have larger appeal. It just can be. I count my suggestion for a syllabus as one.
But as a stronger example, aljazeera.com recently started redirecting ips from the US to the subdomain america.aljazeera.com. I couldn't get around it without a proxy. I wrote them an email suggesting they make the old site ("english") an option from the front page (I pointed to CNN.com as an example). They wrote me back saying they changed it and, when I went there, they even had a pop-up that allowed me to have the english site as my default. They had deliberately put in the functionality but didn't realize that some of us wanted their European coverage, not their America coverage.
In this case maybe the site will offer alternative formats. Maybe they hadn't thought of it.
I also have sites that ignore non-javascript enabled browsers- but they are web-apps and are explicit about the need for js. If I had a normal site with a widget that broke for certain people I very well might take such a comment into serious consideration. It is more helpful, as I said earlier, if such criticism also suggests something that might work well. Otherwise it just sounds like bitching.
In the case of darkpatterns.org, I had to:
- Load the page.
- Allow the domain.
- Reload the page.
- Allow slideshare.net.
- Reload the page.
- Click on the Flash link (yes, Flashblock is also in service here).
- Check for more JS. Yep. Try a few.
- Rinse, wash, repeat of reload, check, click Flash, check, reload ...
Honestly, usually it's not worth my trouble. I fairly frequently encounter pages which fail to function with _all_ JS enabled (possibly due to XSS usage, I haven't troubleshot them, really not a productive use of my time in general). Given that plain Jane HTML is fine for presenting textual / graphical content this is pretty much an anti-pattern.
JS resources claimed by Darkpatterns:
www.google-analytics.com flash.quantserve.com b.scorecardresearch.com slideshare-audio.s3.amazonaws.com darkpatterns.org s3.amazonaws.com www.slideshare.net cdn.slidesharecdn.com static.slidesharecdn.com
But, taking these to a natural conclusion typically results in exactly the Dark Patterns we see here: where users are tricked or misled into agreeing to things they might not if they were offered clear, open and full disclosure upfront.
We can identify dark patterns - but in many cases, these are here because they work. At least, large international businesses such as RyanAir believe that they have a positive outcome which overwhelms any damage to the brand.
I would like to know: how can we resolve these two ideas and run ethical but viable/competitive businesses?
That doesn't stop them from adding dark patterns on top. Acting with business interests in mind, airlines are practically compelled to add dark patterns. Other airlines have moved towards RyanAir's model, not away from it.
I find that frightening, as an ethical person who wants to run a business.
Your comment was regarding conversions and upselling (purporting it as a dichotomy to do those yet deride dark patterns), yet neither of those ever need dark patterns -- if you have a compelling pitch that makes the customer knowingly and intentionally choose the option, you have legitimate business gains.
Lets say you have two airlines that both need to offer a flight for $300 in order to make a reasonable profit. If one shifts $15 of that cost to bag fees, then people will choose that one even though the end cost is the same. The other airlines have to follow suit or they will fail to stay competitive.
There is no way to "resolve" the fact that there are always ways to make money unethically, there are always people taking advantage of them, and if you are a human being you will always feel a twinge of regret and unfairness that you can't join in the fun.
There is nothing intrinsically favoring honest communication or opposing dark patterns about A/B testing.
All other things being equal, you can't. If there are dark patterns that empirically do increase competitiveness in the market of interest at the cost of violating things you hold to be ethical principles, you aren't going to be competitive without employing them unless you have some other non-duplicated market-relevant advantage that compensates for the disadvantage of ethics, unless you can change the market context to eliminate the effectiveness of the dark patterns.
This kinda reminds me of the talk PG gave at 2008 start up school titled "Be Good." (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc) He outlines many ways why it's not merely ethically appropriate to be good, but also a strategically superior approach to running a startup. Ease of use, simplicity, trustworthiness--these are important qualities of a biz's reputation, both internally and in public perception. And Dark patterns tend to harm that reputation.
Edit: Addendum--obviously there are monopolies or monopoly-like situations where reputation isn't important.
If the dark patterns empirically work, then a market context shift is necessary.
> We already have a market place where people who feel tricked or duped will have a lower opinion of the company doing the duping. dark patterns have a bad edge to them too--very few of them, when noticed by the user, leave the user actually feeling good about how they were duped.
If they had enough of a "bad edge" that they didn't actually work to increase the returns realized by a business--then they wouldn't be an issue, as there'd be no incentive to use them.
A/B testing only tells you what works today, not what's going to keep your customers satisfied in the long run.
2) Market won't magically shift - they work based on homo sapiens basic psychology, and that won't change so soon. However, dark patterns can (and are) reduced by making them illegal - effective consumer protection / truthful advertising laws can mitigate them. For example, if 'I agree' opt-out boxes are legally considered invalid, then it makes sense to use opt-in subscriptions; similarly for other [mis]representations.
Ryanair is trap upon trap. Radiobuttons and checkboxes all over the place, and if you forget to confirm not wanting a bag you have to start over on that page and hit all the right settings again. Multiply that five-six times...
(And I wouldn't be surprised if Parsons and O'Leary are buddies.)
It makes a great next-generatin Turing Test -- given zero information about the website (like a person just going to it for the first time), can an artificial intelligence book something on the Ryan Air website with no upsell purchases and not letting the booking process time out (which seems to be between 5 and 30 seconds for each of their 14 steps)?
Instead I chose to fly with a competitor, operating out of a less convenient airport, but with a less scummy online purchase process.
However Ryanair had a 2012 net income of €374 million. That implies their scummy model is successful. This makes me sad.
RyanAir has enabled people who could not afford to travel in the past to be able to do so (especially in Europe, where many immigrants have family in North Africa/Eastern countries). While I share your contempt for some of RyanAir's practices, I do think that low cost flights are good for society as a whole.
http://www.owenkelly.net/763/ryanairs-new-check-in-procedure...
Basically the UI Is set up to purposefully hotswap to confuse the user into accidental purchases.
I've also seen purchase buttons placed extremely near edges in order to capture edge gestures and convert them into purchases.
Used on several of gamelofts latest free to play games.
I think whoever first thought, "Let's port one-click purchases to mobile!" either was being disingenuous or was only successful because it was used in an unintended, quasi-fraudulent way.
Is there any way to structure the incentives of a business to prevent this from happening as a business grows?
Intuitively there is an argument that maintaining simplicity will improve word-of-mouth and conversion rates, but in reality it (unfortunately, perhaps) absolutely is the case that revenue can be massively increased by introducing all kinds of additional advertising, up/cross-sells, and ultimately, dark patterns.
I wonder how true that really is. We’ve recently been looking into advertising options for a new service, and to say that the experience we’ve had trying to arrange Facebook and Google ads has been terrible would be very kind to Facebook and Google. I reckon Facebook have lost half the money we’d have spent with them just through UI failures, up to and including literally not being able to place ads sometimes because their pages simply didn’t work. Google have to date lost 100% of the money we were considering giving to them because we couldn’t figure out what we were getting for our money within a reasonable period of time and whether it was likely to have a reasonable RoI compared to our other options.
As a small business, of course we have only so much financial budget to spend across all advertising channels, but we have even less time for busy founders to figure out where to spend it. A simple “Pay this, get that” kind of deal is much more attractive than these vague, auction-based on-line advertising systems where half the numbers they report seem wildly inconsistent from one page to the next. I’m not sure whether those schemes are intended to be a dark pattern or whether they just feel like it because of their inherently vague nature and frequently appalling UI, but they seem pretty close to the line to me.
Ironically, the unclear deal also makes us hesitant to use these services for our own advertising, for fear of effectively becoming unwelcome advertisers ourselves. I loathe spammers as much as anyone, and on top of that we operate in a relatively small and very social market, so not knowing whether we’re showing marketing material to people who are actually likely to be interested is a big turn-off for us. So I guess as well as being another possible example of a dark pattern, this is also an example of poor UI clearly decreasing revenues rather than increasing them.
Its easy for stakeholders to say "So what? We loose a few customers!"
However, your company really might be loosing a potential investor, a potential business partner, a potential star hire or a potential product champion.
Ambitious companies don't use dark patterns but dying companies do.
We are all hyper-sensitive to design, functionality, behaviour because we build and make decisions about technology, but at the end of the day most people have 5-to-15 minutes to use your product during or between other work and conversations.
Investors will likely not be carefully analyzing your UI, unless they have a lot of time - most of their decision will be based on conversations with your top-level executive team and the information provided therein.
Star hires is a potential one - I can definitely imagine that a lot of very savvy designers and engineers might be put off by manipulative design decisions - but ultimately they may care more about the workplace environment that you claim as a company, the opportunity to be part of a growing business, etc.
I'm a touch on the pessimistic side with this one but these are my perceptions, partly based on experience and partly based on observing startup businesses evolve over time.
I think the real trick is to dark pattern in a way that isn't offensive/egregiously negative to the customer.
How does a new and unexperienced customer at Ryanair feel when he sees the final amount he has to pay? It's obviously a good first conversion, but does it pay off a the second and third etc conversion for ryanair? Does he recommend the service?
He has other choices and the one that tricked him doesn't feel that good anymore...
Ergo: ryanair is optimizing short term conversion.
Short-term metrics are easy but long-term metrics are hard because of complexity.
Also, quantifying human emotion (UX) is also hard.
It seems like great companies have to rely on ethics, company culture and vision to make due in the absence of long-term metrics.
1- http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Design-Interaction-Lead-Temptatio...
Even google does this.
There was a great Behavioral Economics course on Coursera taught by Dan Ariely that touched on methods like these, as well as subtler ones. I think the slide on Organ Donation was from him. https://class.coursera.org/behavioralecon-001/class
===========
I'm glad someone brought up behavioral economics...
Below I've pasted the abstract for the original paper, organ donor paper [1]:
"The well-documented shortage of donated organs suggests that greater effort should be made to increase the number of individuals who decide to become potential donors. We examine the role of one factor: the no-action default for agreement. We first argue that such decisions are constructed in response to the question, and therefore influenced by the form of the question. We then describe research that shows that presumed consent increases agreement to be a donor, and compare countries with opt-in (explicit consent) and opt-out (presumed consent) defaults. Our analysis shows that opt-in countries have much higher rates of apparent agreement with donation, and a statistically significant higher rate of donations, even with appropriate statistical controls. We close by discussing the costs and benefits associated with both defaults as well as mandated choice"
1.) I think what the website is trying to illustrate, is more specific instances where this is applied for bad (fair critique!). However, I think the abstract above bring up an interesting question:
If the framing of an option(s) is causal [2] to it's propensity to be chosen; can one really be upset that their indifference is manipulated?
I want to talk about the "good" application of this which is (arguably?) donating organs. It saves lives, and as it turns out, is dependent strictly on our indifference [3]. I suppose I'm inviting criticism, but what's wrong with that? The idea of saving a life, by most, is considered noble [4]. Even more so, if it was, indeed, important for us to conciously decide on-- why wouldn't we [5]?
If it said:
"Check the box to not be shot with a shotgun, at a distance of 3 feet, in the face, immediately after you turn this in?"
... after a few incidents, social knowledge would spread of the option to drive awareness. It's cost would be measured, most likely choosing indifference would be greater than. I would like to propose the juxtaposition of awareness, reaction, and marginal cost to us is quite large. The point: one is important for us and one is not, the effort to spread awareness or be aware is greater than the potential(?) gain.
In the case of these businesses framing options for increasing profits, not that I think it's right [6], but is it really that dark? Aren't we essentially indifferent to the costs? Is that reason enough to be upset? Have any of these examples shown a cost which exceeds the cost of cognitively reasoning about it? If they have, and you do not opt-out, is there reason to be upset since the marginal utility of not-opting out is, matter of fact, greater to you, than opting out.
2.) If the examples shown on "Dark Patterns" are evil to you:
learn about behavior economics and to spread the knowledge you gain.
Learn about the roots, not symptoms, because the amount of change/awareness you'll be able to make is greater. Yes, it can be applied poorly, to decieve, but it's also can be applied for good. Being aware will make you less susceptible (not always, that's the gambler's fallacy) to mallace and probably make you insist on it for good (e.g. organ donating).
A great Behavioral Economics paper, that also cites the original organ donor work[1] is "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics" by Daniel Kahneman [7].
I think the exploration, and awareness, of the application of framing (menu) options is great. I just hope it doesn't stop there :)
[1] "Defaults and Donation Decisions" Author(s): Eric J. Johnson and Daniel G. Goldstein Source: http://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/sites/decisionsciences/files/fi...
[2] Yeah I said it, causal. I ain't talkin' no correlations 'ere. It's like a hypothesis but less complete ...it's actually for emphasis not a to say I believe it's a physical law (ex. the speed of light).
[3] Using marginal utility is a way to remove indifference (I think it [indifference] is too hard to meaningfully measure) while maintaining the same conclusion. The marginal utility of filling out a form quickly, is greater than spending time deeply analyzing the cost and benefits of such a choice...
[4] Noble: having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals. Source: Mac OS X Dictionary; definition. 2
[5] I find refuting this, in any sense, to be concerning and disheartening-- that is to suggest that a majority of people are inherently incapable. Should that be the case then I propose we as a species are incapable and prone to deciptive tactics. That would mean you too; you're no snowflake.
[6] I believe it's a symptom.
[7] "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics" Author(s): Daniel Kahneman Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (Dec., 2003), pp. 1449-1475
Hanlon's Razor, yadda yadda. These patterns aren't any better if they're accidents, of course, but there'd at least be a chance that the offending company would fix them.
This is not simply bad design.. these things are very deliberate and usually controversial within these companies that implement these tactics.
Its a pretty standard story where Marketing is pushing for short term gains while IT/Web is thinking about the big picture.
So the claim is that Google has an incentive to make it harder to clear local browsing data than if they just considered it from the perspective of what users would want.
I am looking forward to the form to submit a dark pattern. Keep up the great work!