Great stuff, as usual.

My thoughts: This type of ethical conflict is becoming increasingly (depressingly) common in my online and service-design work.

I find it very interesting that behaviours that would be seen as “sharp practice” in the offline world are seen as routine (even smart) business practices online today.

The “easy in, hard to leave” model in particular is one employed by only three offline businesses that I can think of: heroin dealers, the Mafia and the Scientologists. Great company to keep, guys.

As for “sneaky upselling”, so beloved of Ryanair and co, I wonder how the average customer would react if Tesco employed staff to wander round the aisles, surreptitiously slipping products into their customers’ baskets in the hope that they’d checkout without noticing? Sounds pretty dodgy offline, yet it’s routine online.

This relentless drive to maximize revenue at every turn, through sharp practice and deceit, if necessary, is really about a failure of trust, I feel.

Instead of basing one’s business on the assumtion that most customers are essentially honest and have the potential to be loyal to brands, (provided those brands invest in building up a relationship over time, through communication, mutual respect and the exchange of value) companies instead treat customers as untrustworthy, promiscuous whores who’ll leave at the drop of a hat.

This worldview, of course creates exactly what it fears: rather than spend the money and time on building up trust, you instead build services that screw the customer for everything they have during the brief period in which you still have access to their credit card details. Customers can smell this a mile off and, suprise, surprise, they act accordingly. And so, like a jealous husband who locks up his wife to stop her leaving, you end up in a cold, dysfunctional relationship with someone who hates you. And they call this Customer Relationship Management?

Of course, the absurdity of all this makes sense to us as human beings – but something odd seems to happen to otherwise ethical people as soon as their boss gives them a target to meet and points out that “the competition are doing it, so why shouldn’t we?”

Your thoughts?

It’s an area that I’ve been interested in since seeing Josh Porter’s talk at D-Construct 2008 on leveraging congnitive bias in social design. Dark patterns are a subset of this – if you ignore the word ‘social’ anyway. After that talk I asked the question “Is this evil?”, so I’m really pleased to see we’re thinking in the same terms.

I’m particularly interested right now because I’m working on a project for a charity, and I have a question about your ‘code of ethics’ points. Your first point is “Act in the best interests of everyone”. Who do you mean by everyone here? The beneficiaries of the, if not outright Dark then definitely Grey, patterns I’m proposing are small business owners in the developing world. Do you consider use of a dark pattern acceptable in this case? Example: instead of “remove from basket” I label a button “Don’t help Rosita”.

Or do you not consider this a dark pattern at all because it’s using (ahem) emotional blackmail rather than simply making it technically difficult to undo something?