Introduction: Returning to Where It Began
I’m always excited to be part of an external evaluator for doctorate or master’s thesis defenses, and this year happened where I presented my own thesis many years ago, at the first Design University of Latin America (Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial).
Discovering Deceptive Design
Reading the dissertation led me to know more about Deceptive Design Practices, and bump into the very interesting ontology organization by Gray, Santos and Bielova (2023). The term has been growing momentum in the last 5 years and it refers to manipulative design tactics that lead users to take actions not in their best interest.
As defined by Norman and Nielsen, deceptive design is a
“design pattern that prompts users to take an action that benefits the company employing the pattern by deceiving, misdirecting, shaming, or obstructing the user’s ability to make another (less profitable) choice”.
Why Deceptive Design Happens
The 2 authors point that one of the main causes of proliferation of manipulation and trick users to be related to the over focus on analytics conversions, from the rise in popularity of A/B and multivariate testing for optimizing conversions – leading actually to fake conversions where users click on an option, not because is better, but because they got tricked to click on it.
Here are some examples of deceptive patterns:
Obstruction: Making it difficult for a user to make a choice that doesn’t benefit the company, by increasing the interaction cost of finding the relevant information
Visual or wording tricks: When taking advantage of cognitive biases, like misleading wording for questions and answer options or moving a Close button far outside a modal.
Nagging: Tricking users to agree to something, even though they may have already declined the request, like declining cookie options on every link on a website
Emotionally manipulative designs: when it scare, guilt, or shame users into making a choice, like modal dialogues asking users to provide an email address in exchange for a discount code, or to move forward to a next step.
Sneaking or preselection: When a purchase funnel adds extra items to the basket automatically or preselects options that are not required. In these cases, users must identify the added option and remove or uncheck the item.
Social proof: Increase interest and manipulate behavior of users by referencing the behavior of others to induce users own behavior, like showing how many people are playing the same game
Scarcity: Creating a scenario where users think a certain item is almost sold out to create the emergency of taking purchase decisions faster before there is nothing left, like showing that there are only 2 seats available left.
Authority: refers to a person’s tendency to comply with people in positions of authority, like going through government forms providing full agreement of terms and conditions. The same behavior is exploited on videos and podcast that starts presenting the authority of person for a testimonial
Reciprocity: is to give users something before asking for anything from them. It’s been shown that a free sample encourages people to buy the corresponding product because they feel that they have to return the favor.
A very interesting table connecting deceptive (dark) patterns from High-level, Mid-level and Low-level perspectives can be found on the paper Towards a Preliminary Ontology of Dark Patterns Knowledge here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369033001_Towards_a_Preliminary_Ontology_of_Dark_Patterns_Knowledge
Although the deceptive patterns theories are mostly connected to design by scholars and ontology, in the corporate scenario I see the decisions to use manipulative patterns mostly coming from higher positions, with conversion at all costs in mind, without understanding that a manipulated conversion is not a real conversion. Just check how many people drop a journey when asked to provide personal information as a requirement to move forward on the next step of an online task.