That time we continued to ponder the dark side.
Designs that take advantage of your cognitive biases to manipulate you or deceive you are called dark patterns and they are everywhere. And, as we talked about in our last two blog posts (Part 1, and Part 2), it's important to understand these patterns and how they're being used in order to avoid prosecution (and bad karma from the universe!).
In this post, we'll dive into some more dark patterns, the cognitive bias' they may be leveraging, and how to avoid using them in your designs.
Bait and Switch
“There’s no reason to become alarmed, and we hope you’ll enjoy the rest of your flight. By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?” - Elaine, Airplane
"The flower arrangement you selected is not available in your area - try this one that's $20 more instead!"
"You've got great taste! Unfortunately all of the slots for Attracting Gnomes to Your Garden 101 are taken. We recommend taking the entire series of Gnomes Care and Feeding instead for only seven additional payments for $49.99 each!"
Bait and switch patterns suggest that you can get a particular outcome, but when it comes time to commit, an alternate, more expensive, outcome is offered. This pattern operates off of a couple of cognitive bias' working together. Loss aversion bias is our tendency to want to avoid loss rather than gain something. You've decided you want an item - when it's shown as unavailable, you automatically want to avoid that loss. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) also comes into play - we have a very real aversion to missing out on something that everyone else is in on. When you find something in your cart is gone because it's so popular, you're more likely to get the substitute to avoid being "left behind."
More subtle variations of this dark pattern include listing products that don't yet exist but that you intend to implement. "Available in future releases" "Coming soon!" - without a specific time period associated with "soon" or "future", this type of language falls into bait and switch by luring users into purchasing a product on the promise that they will be getting something in the next couple of weeks when, in fact, the real time line is several months or years.
To avoid bait and switch patterns, ensure you are accurately representing the availability of items (see: False Urgency) and if you are truly out between they time they "add to cart" and check out, do not automatically add items to the basket as substitutes. Instead, ask if they would like to see similar offerings or show a selection of similarly priced items (not in the basket) that could be a good substitute.
Personal note to grocery store apps - chicken legs are NOT a good substitute for boneless chicken breasts any more than nuts are a substitute for bolts. Parts are not parts.
If you have an item or feature that you want users to know is being considered for a future release, ensure your language is specific and accurate (will release in February 2024). Save "under-consideration" communications for existing customers and be clear that they are not yet a commitment.
Drip Pricing
“You fool! You’re 30 cents away from having a quarter!”
Sweet Dick Willie, Do the Right Thing
“Only 99.99 - except there's also 59.99 fee for parking and 199.99 for walking through the lobby"
Adding fees or insisting on additional money for something after you have entered the checkout process, or advertising only a portion of what you will have to pay for a given product or service instead of providing full disclosure on the price is called drip pricing.
Drip pricing is a long standing strategy in many industries (most commonly the hospitality industry) to reel in customers with a price they find attractive but then reveal, after they are at or near completion of the transaction, fees and costs that make the final price much higher than the advertised original price. This pattern leverages your present/immediacy bias - our leaning to focus on the current situation rather than focus on future impact. That is, once you are in the middle of a complicated check out procedure and find out about the extra cost, going back and doing it all over again feels like more work than the extra fees are worth. It also leverages your loss-aversion bias - our tendency to find losing something more painful than gaining the same thing is pleasant.
Think about having chosen first class tickets because they were only $10 more than coach, only to find out there are $100 in fees associated with first class right before you book - the potential loss of the first class tickets feels worse than the gain of more affordable seating that is in your budget. It's worth noting that California has outlawed (starting July 1, 2024) the use of drip pricing and the US Federal government is considering new regulations around this tactic (also referred to as "junk fees"). To avoid this type of pattern, advertise the actual, real price including all fees, up front. Never hide necessary fees or costs until later in the checkout process.
Disguised Advertisements
You find yourself on a site offering a free version of some software you've been dying to try. You click download only to be taken to another site entirely (plus no software!) Later you are on a news site, scrolling through the feed. Formatted exactly like the actual news articles is an ad for discounted macbooks.
These are examples of disguised advertisements which is a form of interface interference. And like interface interference, it relies on our reliance on mental shortcuts (in this case common UI patterns) to help us handle information overload and the representative heuristic (our desire for there to be a pattern where one may or may not exist). Disguised advertisements usually appear in crowded, information-rich pages and can be as subtle as a link in the middle of the text that, instead of leading to an explanation, instead takes you to a product page.
These types of advertisements are addressed specifically by the FTC and can provide a serious liability risk for those using them. To avoid using disguised advertising, always label ads as such. Ideally, create a visual distinction that makes it clear that the content is an advertisement and provide corresponding ALT tags to ensure that even if the content is not being consumed visually, it's clear that this piece is an ad.
Nagging
“I can’t take this constant nagging. I’m leaving you, Jerry. I’m leaving you - and I’m taking the monkey with me.” - Peter Appleton, The Majestic
A friend of mine really enjoys video calling but is not a fan of Facetime (long story). Instead she uses a "free" communication app that is video-only. She asked me to install it so she could talk to me, so I did. After a perfectly annoying installation process (do you really need to know where I live? I think not - see Forced Action), I managed to get it installed. It promptly, and without asking, defaulted to enabling badging notifications.
While normally I wouldn't mind this from a communications application, this one insists on badging (the small red dot in the upper right hand corner of the app on your phone screen) to indicate that I haven't explored the entire application, including paying for an upgrade. Nothing I do gets rid of it, short of disabling all notifications from the app (which I did).
Nagging is the practice of pestering, disrupting or annoying users to make a commercial gain. Patterns that continually ask to enable notifications or provide information that attempt to increase the time and money you spend in an application are considered nagging. Part of a larger architecture known as Nudges, this pattern is intended to guide or move the user in a particular direction. The psychology behind nudges (and nagging) was made popular in the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Thaler and Sunstein and applies to many disciplines. One of the most famous examples of nudging is the image of a house fly in a men's urinal in an airport in Amsterdam (intended to improve aim and lower cleaning costs. Yes, it worked.). Other examples include putting the choices the grocery store wants you to choose at eye level, providing a default selection in check out options (like an option to subscribe to the newsletter), and using AI to show ads based on past browsing behavior.
Nagging relies on moving your decision making from the reflective side of your decision system to the automatic side of your decision system. Automatic decisions are easy and we like them because we don't have to think about them. Reflective decisions are harder, because we have to consider and be more intentional in our thinking. (see Kannemans' Thinking Fast and Slow for an in-depth look at this). When we are making automatic decisions, we are much more susceptible to cognitive biases like anchoring (taking the first option presented as the baseline and comparing all options afterwards to that).
Nagging, in particular, is intended to guide us into taking action by relying on our already overtasked brains’ information overload to be willing to pay to just make it go away. It's a strategy I often use on my kids to get them to clean their rooms or eat their veggies (and that they use on me to get ice cream). And while nagging to get your teenager to pick up their stinky clothes off the floor may be marginally effective, widely accepted, and ok, nagging to get your customers to upgrade to a paid version or add a new feature is not ok, regardless of its effectiveness or acceptance. To avoid nagging, ensure that your reminders, nudges, badging, messaging and so on is off by default and it is clear when it is turned on what type of messaging is going to be provided (marketing, system needs, etc.)
In our final blog post on dark patterns, we'll talk about trick questions, saas billing, and rogue malware. Until then, remember to be clear and honest (but not annoying)
