Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 193 posts

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#91

Post by hanley »

rybosome wrote: post #62
gthtjtkt wrote: post #57

Experienced this recently with Hello Fresh. The 'Cancel Subscription' button was so hard to find that I had to spend 10 minutes Googling it (the placement had changed over time and was always difficult to find, so a lot of the search results were no longer relevant). You had to click a button to reveal the cancellation link, and it was a tiny line of grey text on a beige background. Then, to make it better, they star…

That was my experience as well. I wanted to cancel because the interface for pausing deliveries was so painful to use that my wife and I often failed or forgot to pause weeks which were too busy to receive a delivery, thus wasting large amounts of money. After cancelling they hounded me with phone calls for weeks. We have since signed up for a competing service (Green Chef), and I have no interest in going back.

The Green Chef cancellation isn't easy either. You have to email them and request a cancellation link.

FWIW, I got terrible food poisoning from one of Green Chef's meals. Always make sure the food is still cold when you receive it, I thought it was "cold enough" but I was wrong.

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#92

Post by chimprich »

One pattern I've seen recently that's been increasingly prevalent (but I haven't seen discussed anywhere) is of a form where a site gives you two options in a dialog box along the lines of:

Would you like to sign up to our newsletter? o [[[ OK!! ]]] o No I'm an idiot and I don't want to save money or hear about the latest job offers that may change my life

(Exaggerated slightly.)

I'm not sure this if this technically counts as a dark pattern as it's fairly transparent but I find it is very annoying because it is an attempt to force a user to state an opinion they probably don't hold if they don't want to sign up for whatever service.

I assume it does work or it wouldn't spread so widely but exploiting people's reluctance to criticise themselves seems quite unpleasant: I imagine this affects people with the weakest self-esteem the most.

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#93

Post by Bartweiss »

partiallypro wrote: post #85

Stamps.com is so scammy. You sign up for a free trial, then get enrolled without asking you into their payment plan. Then when you go to cancel, you can't. You have to call. But guess what? It has weird hours. When you finally do call during their hours it's a machine that you're talking to, not a person. Ok, so you have hours of when I can cancel...clearly not because you have shift hours, since I'm talking to a mac…

I have yet to work out whether "limited hours for an automated system" is a dark pattern, or sheer stupidity.

The most horrifying variant I've seen recently was a government website that kept 9am-5pm hours. No human interaction or real-time events anywhere, but logins were locked after business hours. I'm guessing they didn't want to arrange special downtime periods for changes, and the only alternative they could think of was 16 hours/day of scheduled downtime.

It's a bad day when registered mail would be easier than using the automated system.

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#94

Post by prplhaz4 »

chimprich wrote: post #92

One pattern I've seen recently that's been increasingly prevalent (but I haven't seen discussed anywhere) is of a form where a site gives you two options in a dialog box along the lines of: Would you like to sign up to our newsletter? o [[[ OK!! ]]] o No I'm an idiot and I don't want to save money or hear about the latest job offers that may change my life (Exaggerated slightly.) I'm not sure this if this technically…

From a previous HN discussion...IMO, obnoxious and genius.

http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11855787

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#95

Post by gilgongo »

How does Harry Brignull get his dark patterns site covered so regularly? About once a year for the past decade, somebody does an article about it. Weird.

Anyway. I'm a designer and my work has even featured on his site (after he did some freelancing with us - cheeky begger). His implication that people like me sit around trying to making life harder for customers is complete bollocks. We don't. Businesses just don't. It's bad business and nobody would willing do it.

Usually (and I grant their might be a tiny number of exceptions) they have to do things crappily because of constraints beyond their control. It may seem malicious to the likes of a freelance design-and-run merchant like Brignull, but it's not. It can also just be clueless visual designers wanting to make things pretty at the expense of being usable. But mostly it's just hidden constraints.

But hey who cares. It's good rant material.

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#96

Post by jonlucc »

yedpodtrzitko wrote: post #53

The worst thing I've seen is G2A Shield - it takes 10 steps to deactivate it, and each step has the "cancel" button much more dominant than the "continue" button, see: http://imgur.com/a/PUwPC

This looks remarkably similar to Audible's unsubscribe flow. I was a member, but I've had less time to listen and increased my podcast count, so I decided to cancel and pick it back up in a year or so.

They ask a million times if you're sure and then offer another million other options (suspend the account for a few months, after which they will automatically charge you again). After you get through that, including a screen warning that you will lose unused credits, they offer a plan that will let you keep the credits you've already paid for by paying them another, smaller sum (I think $10 a year).

I will definitely think hard before reactivating.

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#97

Post by EdHominem »

stanmancan wrote: post #79
kordless wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really shouldn't ask leading questions, because they are technically equivalent to blaming statements. What I meant was that "it does NOT matter" whether it's a UX bug or an intentional pattern. The effects can be the same. If a company doesn't have a lot of money to produce a good UX because they spent it all on trips up to Tahoe for a "workcation", and people rely on that software, it's the same damn thing no mat…

Requiring someone to log in to use your site or service is not a dark pattern though. There's nothing nefarious going on there. As another poster said somewhere in this chain, if upon signing up you have to give your life away via the TOS, or there's pre-checked boxes signing you up for mailing lists, those are dark patterns. Simply requiring a user sign up is not.

That's not what the users say.

Sure, it could be darker. But when you see a bit of a crummy pattern you usually walk away instead of checking out just how bad it could get.

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#98

Post by Bartweiss »

maxxxxx wrote: post #84
gthtjtkt wrote: post #57

Experienced this recently with Hello Fresh. The 'Cancel Subscription' button was so hard to find that I had to spend 10 minutes Googling it (the placement had changed over time and was always difficult to find, so a lot of the search results were no longer relevant). You had to click a button to reveal the cancellation link, and it was a tiny line of grey text on a beige background. Then, to make it better, they star…

AOL was notorious for almost being impossible to cancel. I remember when I had Netflix for a while and decided to cancel it was really easy to do so. Although I canceled that alone gave me a positive impression of Netflix.

Netflix has always been classy about that - canceling is genuinely easy, and I believe you can cancel rollover on your free trial as soon as you get it. After you leave, it's like one email and then a followup with another free trial 6-12 months later.

I guess selling an actually-good product with few competitors has its advantages.

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#99

Post by ViViDboarder »

FireBeyond wrote: post #72
mknocker wrote: post #10

Some of these cases are not only dark patterns, they constitute was it legally known as fraud. If you deceive someone in order to gain a financial advantage, it is fraud. The problem is that going against those gigantic companies is very difficult.

And then others aren't dark patterns. One of the first examples, British Airways, is pretty unfairly called out. The article says that they imply "cheapest at the top". No, the flights aren't shown "cheapest at the top", and they never imply they are. They're sorted in chronological order. There is a summary item that says the lowest fare for a booking class that day, but that's all.

The author used it as an example of something that may just be an unintuitive UI.

Re: Dark Patterns are designed to confuse and enroll

#100

Post by zeta0134 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #84
gthtjtkt wrote: post #57

Experienced this recently with Hello Fresh. The 'Cancel Subscription' button was so hard to find that I had to spend 10 minutes Googling it (the placement had changed over time and was always difficult to find, so a lot of the search results were no longer relevant). You had to click a button to reveal the cancellation link, and it was a tiny line of grey text on a beige background. Then, to make it better, they star…

AOL was notorious for almost being impossible to cancel. I remember when I had Netflix for a while and decided to cancel it was really easy to do so. Although I canceled that alone gave me a positive impression of Netflix.

Ditto to this. I realized I had an unused Netflix subscription, and not only did they cancel it, the rep apologized, said that happens a lot, and helped me negotiate a full refund with no questions asked. I came back a few months later when the Flash came out, re-subscribed, and have been happy turning it on once in a while to watch shows, then back off again when I'm less interested.

It's been lovely. More companies should do this, because it makes me actively want to support them.

Post reply on HN