What are Dark Patterns

My first thought when hearing this term was: this must be something bad designers do and that wasn’t actually true about dark patterns. The correct definition could be:

A dark pattern is a design pattern used to serve the interests of companies rather than users.

Having this definition, a designer who chooses or is paid to use these kind of patterns is not actually a bad one, but rather he/she chooses to use tricks to make people perform actions they wouldn’t normally do.

Dark pattern can vary from subtle omissions to BIG lies, but the common motive is to make people behave against their interests, like spending extra money.

Some examples of dark patterns are:

1. Hidden costs
2. Making it hard to unsubscribe from notifications, emails, etc.
3. Pop-ups that are shown all the time when entering a site
4. Disguised Ads that can look like legit actions that can be performed on the site
5. Not notifying users about their free trial end and charging them automatically

And the list goes on.

I always wonder what criteria big companies use to sort their products when choosing the option to sort by popularity.

What to do about them

They are basically everywhere and whether we like them or not, we need to be careful while browsing the web. If you have the power you could call out companies for doing these tricks. Usually users of a certain company will eventually stop using their products or services if they get annoyed or feel forced to consume them.

“If you know what cognitive biases are and the kind of tricks that can be used to change your mind to persuade you to do things, then you’re less likely to have them trick you,”

Harry Brignull