Dark Patterns Dangers
These patterns are the things that are used in various website and mobile applications to deceive the user into purchasing or sharing critical information about them to the company without any intimation. Because of these patterns, people are losing their right to choose.
What is Dark Pattern?
Henry Brignull, one of the renowned UX designers coined the term “Dark Pattern” and categorizes all type of patterns into following categories:
- Bait and Switch
- Disguised Ads
- Forced Continuity
- Friend Spam
- Hidden Costs
- Misdirection
- Confirmshaming
Let’s Discuss all these patterns one by one and secure us from giving sensitive information to a website.
Bait and Switch Pattern
This is the sales tactics that lure customers with a low price of the item and then once the user wants to buy the item it will be switched to similar item with a higher price.
For example:
Suppose you are surfing the internet to buy home decors like a curtain or an antique vase, and suddenly you got an offer for an antique vase with a 50% off to buy from a particular site. You clicked on the offer and redirected to the site with items details and you realized that the item is unavailable but you can buy a similar vase paying 20% more the cost. Thus, this deceives user to pay more for an item than its usual price.
Disguised Ads
These Ads are disguised into some actions or navigations so that any person is tricked to click on the Ad.
For example
Softpedia, a site which helps you download various software, they disguise their Ad into a download button and enforce user to click on it. Below is the image of the site, and the disguised Ad is marked with a red border.
Forced Continuity
When your free trial for software comes to an end and silently the credit card has been charged for the continuation of the service without any warning.
For example
We have many examples of this and one of them is Netflix, once you start your free trial, after the end of the trial version you are charged the subscription fee without any notification.
A similar example is Smallpdf, please find below the screenshots of the application.
The small pdf asked you to start your free trial and giving you some options whether you want a web app or both web and desktop application. when you clicked on the start free trial, it will redirect you to another page given below.
And now the game begins, you will enter your debit/credit card information to start your free trial and after 14 days of a trial version without notification, you will be charged from your account the subscription fee and keep running the subscription on your behalf.
Friend Spam
In this pattern, the product will ask for your email or social permission to make the desired outcome(eg: building network) and then spam your contact list claiming that the mail is from you.
For example:
The classic example of this is LinkedIn, previously LinkedIn used to get your email address and ask the permission to use your mail contacts to build a strong professional for you shown below.
And now when you enter your email address and press continue it will give you the list of the contacts and have a button “Add to network” when you click on that you are permitting to spam your contacts on your behalf.
Hidden Costs
In this pattern, when you are in the last step of checkout there will be an extra charge they will incur like convenience charge, service charge, etc.
For Example
GoIbibo, when you are planning to book a flight at the time of payment, you will be unexpectedly charged a convenience fee which will increase your total cost of purchase.
Now, when you enter the details and go and click proceed to pay the convenience fee is added shown below.
Misdirection
This pattern exploits conventional user behavior. The users are trained to click and use highlighted call to action or words like “cheapest” or “lowest”. And using these pattern the user will be forward by the company.
ConfirmShaming
This is pattern makes you feel guilty for not signing up for something. The content has been written in such a way that you will feel bad if you do not sign up for it and because of the guilt you signup unnecessarily.
For example
Thus by being aware of the dark patterns, we can prevent ourselves from getting cheated in this world of wide network usage.