In our previous What the FAQ? we talked about how click baiting is a dark pattern. Now you might be wondering “What the heck’s a dark pattern?” A dark pattern is a user interface or technique meant to trick you into doing things you might not normally do.
What sort of things you say? How about trying to sneak in extra insurance to your flight, opting you into sales newsletters by default when you fill in a contact form, or signing you up to a recurring bill when you thought something was free. Dark patterns come in all kinds of nefarious shapes and sizes. FreeCreditReport.com I’m looking at you (don’t go there).
Are they only online?
Dark patterns exist both on and offline. Even the sales technique of putting big sale signs by the front door of a store but keeping all the on sale merchandise in the very back on cluttered racks is a bit of a dark pattern (let’s call it light grey). People are drawn in by the sale but then enticed by all the beautifully displayed, full-priced items they have to pass by before they get to the sale.
Truly dark patterns are malicious and nasty. Always trying to find ways to get you to part with your money. They’re so frustrating and so many people often fall victim to them that Harry Brignull started DarkPatterns.org to inform you of these tricks. Once enough consumers know about a trick it’s no longer effective and hopefully, will go away.
So what are some our favourites? Of course, by favourite we mean ‘ones that drives us mad’. Here are a couple:
Sneaking Items Into Your Cart: Ryanair
Ryanair has to be the king of extra fees in the airline world. You have to be vigilant when booking a ticket on their site. One step in the process provides you with a dropdown and asks you to select the country of residence for each passenger. What this actually does though is signs you up for travel insurance. If you don’t want insurance you have to select “Don’t Insure Me” from the list, which is sorted alphabetically so it’s squat between Denmark and Finland. Not exactly intuitive.
Trick Questions: Kijiji
Unless you live under a rock you’ll know that Kijiji is a online classified site similar to Craigslist. You can post an ad for free in any number of categories but if you really want to off-load your item in a hurry you can pay to promote your ad. After the ad’s been submitted you’ll get a verification email. The catch is that the email was very misleading for a time.
Instead of giving you a straight up link to activate your free ad, it would instead include a link that would activate but then take you straight to the payment options to promote the ad. Users were tricked into thinking they had to pay to activate the ad. This dark pattern has since been corrected.
Hidden Click, Crouching Ad: Various
Have you ever been on a website and the entire background is taken over by an ad? Annoying, but we can live with it. The worst is when the background is also clickable. Have you ever really paid attention to how much you click in the backgrounds of websites? These sites were taking advantage of the fact that we do it. A lot. Sometimes unconsciously. Sometimes to refocus our mouse. Either way, it was a spammy way to get us to click your link. Thankfully, this dark pattern seems to be on the way out.
Dark patterns aren’t the result of lazy coding or design – they are deliberate attempts to trick you. As a site owner, it might be tempting to try out some of these tricks because they look like they could yield big results fast, but remember that they’ll only make your users angry and dash any hopes of building long term relationships with them.
Don’t be smarmy. Resist the dark side patterns.
