Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

With great power, comes great responsibility

User experience design, at its core, is the blend of multiple disciplines in order to create solutions to people’s problems. We need to know about visual design, technology, psychology, and more to create the experiences our users come to in order to accomplish their goals. Within those disciplines, we need to be aware of how people think, so that we can structure an experience that allows them to move through the system easily and efficiently.

All this knowledge is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, knowing someone’s motivations and perceptions of visual elements on a screen is very useful for helping them — we can highlight the most valuable elements on a screen so that people engage with them first. On the other hand, if we know where people want to look and click, we can put whatever we want in those places — good, or bad.

As the designers of the experiences we create for our users, we have a great power to influence what our users do. We can use design techniques to shape minds, nudge users, and adjust behavior. We can design an experience to shift metrics and numbers in our favor, at the expense of users. Or we can use it to do good, treat our users right, and help them best accomplish their goals.

Too often, there is the temptation to steer the product into one that takes advantage of human behavior and manipulates users into engaging with a system at the benefit of the business, not the user. This temptation often leads teams to practice deceptive design.

What is deceptive design?

Deceptive design, or sometimes called “dark patterns”, is the practice of using psychology and human nature against users in an attempt to elicit specific behavior from those users. It’s based on tricking users into doing things they don’t want to or didn’t mean to do, like sign up for a service, use a platform for extended periods of time, or engage with content unwittingly.

Deceptive design is insidious. It promotes metrics and revenue at the expense of users. It’s recurring credit card charges for a service you forgot you signed up for. It’s cancellation policies that prevent…