Back in the ’90s, Columbia House famously had the biggest scam going in the mail. Subscribers could get 13 CDs for just a penny, but if they didn’t get that little card back to them immediately, every month, they’d overpay for a record Columbia House executives picked for them. Columbia House may have died with the MP3, but its underhanded tactics have not only thrived, but mutated, into what are increasingly called “dark patterns.” So what are they?
It sounds like a bad thriller you buy at the airport, but dark patterns are simply intentional designs in the way websites are built that manipulate you and your wallet in various ways. This can be as simple as asking for forgiveness rather than permission when enrolling you in an email list or as underhanded as hiding charges on your order checkout, hoping you won’t notice. Many of the dark patterns uncovered by user experience designer Harry Brignull are designed to exploit basic human flaws. We don’t read things that look boring. We mindlessly agree with sites we trust. And we don’t consider the implications of what we’re agreeing to.
And this is hardly just the domain of sketchy merchants and questionable web forums. How many times have you bought something from a site, checked out as a “guest” and discovered the site has “helpfully” checked off the “special offers” button for you? That in and of itself can be obnoxious, but it can be far more pernicious than that. Brignull busted a major credit card provider for tricking customers into deactivating paper bill services, making it much easier to miss when the balance is due. And needless to say, sites like Facebook are hardly noted for good, simple design when it comes to guarding your privacy.
Brignull points out that in some cases, this isn’t done with any sort of malice. Sometimes poor web design is just poor web design, and companies either don’t know enough to fix it or don’t even realize it’s a problem. Still, like it or not, solving these problems is up to us, so when you load a form, read it carefully. You might be surprised by what you’re agreeing to.
(Via Ars Technica)