The slippery slope

July 23, 2013

A paraphrased transcript of my talk at SMX Munich 2013

Let’s start with a little game. In iOS, there’s an ad tracking feature that allows advertisers to identify you (albeit anonymously). It’s turned on by default. Let’s see if we can work out how to turn it off together. Go into your settings and scroll down.


There we go! Ad tracking must be in “Privacy”, right?


Oh. That’s strange, ad tracking isn’t in the privacy menu – so let’s keep looking. Let’s go back to the main settings page and go into “General”.


“General” is a crappy name for a menu item. It’s basically a bucket of miscellaneous stuff that they didn’t know what to do with. If we tap it, this is what we see:


The first item inside “General” is labelled “About”. Do you think Ad Tracking is in there? It’s a bit of a long shot, but let’s take a look:


Yawn – nothing to see here! But wait, what’s this at the very bottom?


Advertising. Well I never – let’s tap it and see.


We’ve found it! Even better, it says “Limit ad tracking off”. So ad tracking is off already. I’m not being tracked, thank goodness.

But wait a minute. It doesn’t say “Ad tracking – off” it says “Limit ad tracking – off”. So it’s a double negative. It’s not being limited, so when this switch is off, ad tracking is actually on.

Off means on! This is actually a great example of what I define as a Dark Pattern. It’s a user interface that uses manipulative techniques to get users to do things they would not otherwise have done.

The thing about Dark Patterns is that you design them from the exact-same rulebooks that we use to enhance usability. Here’s Nielsen’s ten heuristics, probably one of the most well known set of usability guidelines, created back in the early 1990s.


And here they are inverted!


We can take those three and they pretty much spell out the strategy that Apple used in the example we’ve just seen. One of the things that interests me is the question of why organisations do this sort of thing. I think there are a number of reasons, but the main one is the way targets are set and followed.

To explore this, I’d like you to join me in a little thought experiment. Imagine you’re operations director for an NHS hospital in the UK. Imagine you’ve got three kids and a big mortgage. This job is everything to you. So how would you react when your boss says to you that you have to cut wait times to under 5 minutes per patient or you’re fired. Just think about this for a moment. You’ve got no spare capital, no spare staff time, no way to stretch your resources. How can you possibly do this?


Image credit: Gary Rowlands

Well here’s a little idea. How about you create a job role for a nurse where their job is simply to say hello to new patients. Nothing more. That way the patients are seen to, that way the wait time problem is solved. You get to keep your job. Sounds devious – but this really happened throughout the NHS in the 90s.


After about 5 years, the NHS realised what they’d done. An NHS spokesperson admitted in the British Medical Journal that: “We shouldn’t just count things that are easily counted – but provide meaningful data about the quality and effectiveness of treatment in the NHS.” So let’s just summarise:


They hit their targets – they did their jobs – and it looked good on paper; but in reality they created a cheaper, nastier experience. In other words, they created a Dark Pattern – just like Apple’s ad tracking UI.

To put it another way, Dark Patterns are often conversion rate optimisation projects that have gone wrong because of an unhealthy working environment. Back in 2010 I became pretty obsessed with black hat UIs so I created this term – Dark Patterns – as a sort of awareness drive – and it worked. I created darkpatterns.org for the community to name and shame the worst offenders. It gets featured in the press every few months, and this creates pressure on the offenders. A few of them have actually been embarrassed into changing their UIs for the better, which is nice.

Now what I could do for the rest of the talk is just walk you through each of the examples on the site. But there’s not much point as you can just go read that on your own time. So instead I’m going to show you some new examples that I’ve gathered together especially for this talk. Let’s start with marketing emails. I’ve chosen this example because I’m certain that most of us here have faced this exact challenge.

Imagine this is part of a website registration form. After the user has entered their email address and a password, we want them to join the mailing list – right?


Well, this particular approach is fairly standard but isn’t hugely effective because users have to take an explicit action to opt in. Chances are they’ll be in a hurry and a proportion of users wont even notice this text – that’s the pink proportion on the left there.

How about this? Mandatory yes / no radio buttons with neither option pre-selected.


This way you’re guaranteed that user will have to make a choice. Everyone has to notice! This seems pretty ethical, doesn’t it. But on the other hand. if we think back to our anti-usability principles, we can use the phenomenon of not noticing to our advantage! How about we design it so that when you don’t notice, you opt in by mistake.


On post-office.co.uk, they do just that. Here, a tick means no. It’s kind of clever because culturally, a tick is an affirmative action.


And they’ll definitely get opt ins from those people who don’t pause to read this stuff. On the one hand this works – they will boost the mailing list opt-in rate – but a certain number of people will realise that the website is pulling a trick and they will swear angrily under their breaths. It’s probably not going to make them drop out just yet, but it is going to tarnish the brand reputation, at least a little bit.

Royalmail.co.uk takes it a step further. Two rows of check boxes, the first is tick to opt out, the second is tick to opt in.


Have you ever heard of a trammel net?


It’s a type of fishing net that is made up of two layers of different types of net. The fish – or your user – can either get caught up by the first layer, or the second layer, or they can get stuck between the two. They’re banned in most kinds of commercial fishing, but it seems you can put them in your UIs without any legal repurcussions.

Here’s another approach which you can find on the Santander corporate banking site.


When you register you’re taken to this long and boring page of Ts&Cs. You can just click “accept” at the top there – the red button. Or, if you want, you can scroll down.


All the way down to section 9. If you’ve got your reading glasses on, you’ll notice that they intend to sell your phone, fax, mobile and address – but that’s OK because you can opt out via this tiny checkbox here.

These solutions are all kind of tiptoing around the problem, though. We could actually take this to another level entirely and get rid of any uncertainty whatsoever. This is how Quora does it:


They don’t mess around with opt ins or questions of any kind. They just opt you in as part of the terms of service. This is what you see when you’re registered – if you take the time to go to the email notifications page.


There are 47 email notifications. You’re automatically opted into most of them.

Here’s another question – imagine you’ve got a large user-base already. What do you do if you want more of them to opt in to email notifications? Well, let me introduce you to the email notification dark pattern. In September 2012, findings.com created a new notification setting – and defaulted all their existing users to “on”.


It’s a fiendishly simple solution. Why even ask when you can just flick the switch for them? Unsurprisingly, some people got pretty annoyed by this and gave them a telling off.


What was great is that they instantly appologised, pulled the feature and described it as a douchebag startup move.


Meanwhile, Twitter is continuing to use this dark pattern and hasn’t issued an appology. These email digests were added a while back:


The thing to take away here is to realise that although it’s easy to play these tricks, they will piss off your users. It’s quite useful to think of your brand’s relationship with your users in human terms.


If Twitter was your other half, a trick like this isn’t that bad. It’s a bit like they farted in bed. It’s gross, it does make you angry but you’ll forgive them for it – at least for now.

If you look at app.net – it’s essentially just a Twitter clone with one unique selling point – the fact that they don’t pull any douchebag start-up moves.


It’s crazy when you think about it – Twitter has actually given them a business model. They’re not a threat yet, but the point still stands.

Okay so let’s move on to another Dark Pattern – Forced Continuity. This is best to explain with an example. This is theladders.com:


Note: All screengrabs of Theladders.com were taken in April 2013.

They are a fairly big US-based job board, founded 9 years ago. They’ve got about 400 employees and roughly $100 million dollars in revenue last year. VC funded too. What I’m about to tell you is quite hard hitting so please do check this yourself and let me know if I’m wrong. Anyway, let’s sign up for free basic membership.


Since I’m signing up for free, there’s no point in reading this stuff, right?


After this I’ll go through a few sign up steps and then I’ll search for a job. Here are my search results. Let’s say the second one down there looks really appealing.


What’s weird is that when I try to select the text, I can’t. This website has disabled text selection with JavaScript. Most users wont give that a second thought, so let’s park that thought for now and click on the job title to get some more information and apply. (Edit: this talk was written in March 2013. It appears that now (July 2013) they are AB testing different versions of the logged-in area. If you register for yourself you may receive a version of the UI that does not include this copy-disabling feature).


I clicked apply a moment ago and I thought I was going to see the job details and the application form. Instead I’m seeing a paywall and it’s telling me that I need to upgrade to apply for this role!

Now what I don’t know right now is that this job ad is freely available on the web elsewhere.


Suddenly disabling text selection makes sense. They want to discourage people from bypassing their paywall by copying the job description and pasting it into Google as a search term. They don’t want people to get to the true source. In this case the job was published on bloomberg’s careers site where you can apply free.

I haven’t taken a large sample, but from a cursory analysis it looks like a fairly large chunk of the listings behind the paywall are available free elsewhere on the web.

Anyway, I was about to naively sign up at the paywall wasn’t I. Let’s go ahead and do that. I’m going to go for a one month subscription, because that’s cheapest, isn’t it?


$25 is pretty cheap as a one of cost, compared to any of these recurring monthly fees, right? But hang on. Take a look at this grey 10 point text on a grey background right at the bottom of the page. It almost looks as if it’s been designed to be overlooked doesn’t it?


And it tells me here that the membership is automatically renewed. So by choosing $25, I’m actually going for the most expensive monthly payment – it’s not the cheapest option at all! Now once I’ve signed up, they somehow neglect to mention auto-renew anywhere prominent.

If I dig into my account settings, then go to the membership page then I’ll finally be able to turn it off – but in reality who’s going to do that? What normal person explores the account settings pages?


So here’s another usability heuristic flipped around. You know how your conversion rate drops in correlation with the number of required form fields? You know how that’s normally really frustrating?


Well, on theladders.com they use it to their advantage. When you click “turn off auto-renew” they don’t give you a confirmation message – they take you to this form.


You have to fill in every single field or your cancellation is not accepted. It’s high friction by design. Very sneaky stuff.

Going back to our metaphor with human relationships – if in the previous example Twitter was just farting in bed. This example is more like having an affair.

SMXMunich-post.056

Affairs only work while the secret is kept. When the secret comes out, the breakup happens. JustFab.com are using a similar trick:


They are a VC funded ecommerce site. Users think they’re buying an item but they’re signing up for membership at $45 dollars a month. If you go to the terms of service, it explains that you’ll be automatically enrolled in the JustFab VIP membership when you buy an item. Cheeky stuff.


And their users seem to agree with me – apparently they have a class action lawsuit pending. Next.co.uk also does something very similar. On one of the checkout pages it asks you if you want the free next directory.


It even pre-selects the radio button. Sounds OK right – who doesn’t like free stuff? But let’s look at the small print.


Here they explain that by proceeding with the purchase, you’re consenting to a credit check and having a Next.co.uk credit account opened for you. Then they explain that after the first free directory, you’ll be charged for all subsequent directories. Most stores give away free brochures – I did a bit of digging and it turns out that these guys publish four a year and charge you £3.75 each! As you can see, they don’t mention this anywhere at the point of sign-up.

Another related dark pattern is the Roach Motel. It’s where you make it easy to join, and hard to leave. Bank accounts are a great example of this. For example, it’s very easy to open a savings account but it’s a huge pain in the ass to move all your money out of that account and into another, then close the empty account.


Most UK savings accounts come with some sort of bonus period of high interest, which then gets slashed after a year or two. Funnily enough they don’t make much effort to remind you about this.

In other words, they’ve combined “Bait and Switch”, with “Roach Motel”.

According to moneyfacts.co.uk almost half of all UK savers have savings accounts that pay less than 0.5% interest. That’s lower than inflation. We can only guess how many millions are being made by banks in this way. It’s crazy. There are actually services out there that specifically aim to destroy this dark pattern. This is savingschampion.co.uk:


Basically you fill in a form telling them what bank you’re with and what account you have. They’ll then then notify you if your bank ever cuts the interest rates and they’ll tell you what account to switch to. What’s funny is that this simply shouldn’t need to exist – it’s an anti-dark-pattern service!

Finally, here’s the last pattern I’m going to talk to you about: Midirection. Let’s imagine you’ve done a search for “cannot empty clipboard in excel” and you find yourself on experts exchange. This is actually quite an old example but I like it.


It looks like the answer is behind a paywall. In fact it’s just way, way down the page – right at the bottom.


This trick gives them an SEO benefit while simutaneously tricking users into subscribing. They’ve actually been doing this for years – since 2007 in fact. In 2008, stackoverflow was launched. This was their unique selling point:

SMXMunich-post.070

This is such a good case study showing what can happen if you systematically use Dark Patterns as part of your growth strategy.

Experts Exchange could still be a dominant force today, but they’re not. They got greedy, they used Dark Patterns, everyone got annoyed with them and migrated to a friendlier, more ethical competitor.

When you look at your customers in aggregate, it’s easy to be very detached and impersonal about it. To understand the reality of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your product, you have to zoom in.


Good design – and good business – is all about empathy with our fellow humans. In fact it’s not really limited to business – it’s society as a whole. It’s what defines us as human. To understand the true impact of your designs, you have to work at a human level of focus. You have to see the whites of their eyes and their facial expressions. That’s really the whole point of this talk.

At the end of the day, you should evaluate what you really want from your customers. Do you just want them to just use your service, or do you want more?

Personally I think usage alone is cheap. A good brand is liked. A great brand is loved and respected. I hope that today I’ve shown you’ll never reach that point if you use Dark Patterns.

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