101–110 of 193 posts
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It seems like your first problem is you're using Windows 10. You agreed to let them do what they want with THEIR operating system.
I've found nearly every operating system I use tends to change and do what "they" want.
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…
If you're an HNer and you perpetuate this rubbish please stop and grow some ethics.
AVG had (possibly still does) a dark pattern with their free AV software, and I fell for it once. I was in the middle of a game when the stupid ad for Web TuneUp[0] appeared from my task bar over the screen. The linked image is exactly how it appeared with the auto-confirm box pre-checked. In a rush to dismiss the ad to get back to my match, I accidentally clicked the OK button instead of the tiny decline. Of course,…
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Old idea. There's banks and cc companies that currently and previously have offered this. It never caught on because there's not a market for it.
There's at least a market of one, the person to whom I replied. Thanks for the snark though. And none of my banks offer this that I know of? If they do, the UX certainly isn't anything like this.
Citibank and Bank of America (and their subsidiary FIA Card Services) are the big ones who currently offer this service and there's a whole host of other third party services as well some big names and some small names.
AMEX discontinued theirs in 2004, Discover discontinued theirs in 2011, reinstated it, and then discontinued it again in 2015, PayPal's Virtual Debit Card discontinued in 2010.
They don't provide much use because you probably would have better luck disputing the auto charge with your credit card company anyways. They don't offer any additional fraud protection and they may not work as you expect. Additionally taking away auto-payment to a service you signed up for doesn't actually cancel the service, you still have to unsubscribe. You may actually still owe them money depending on what you signed up for.
Adobe flash update notification always have the McAfee Antivirus trial installer pre-selected by default. Pisses me off every time.
It unselects everything by default...
I'm wondering if there would be any value in an Anti-Dark Pattern plugin? Basically a browser plugin that un-does all of the dark patterns companies use to try and trick people and give you a straight result.
I've been thinking of writing a simple add-on just to get rid of that annoying "Get to Google Faster" box Google puts on every search result if Google isn't your default search engine. (Google is my default search engine, but because I have their tracking blocked, their web site doesn't know this.)
Companies that do this sort of crap may not win much by it in the long run. One of the reasons for Amazon's success is easy order cancellation. That's what makes one-click ordering work. Their innovation was not that you can order with one click; it's that you can easily undo a one-click order. That makes it a safe feature for consumers. Most businesses still don't get this.
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.
I consider myself a savvy shopper. I pay attention to every single charge, I read the fine print, I keep spreadsheets for "cancel dates" but even I've been burned before. I apparently signed up for auto renewal with magazines.com. They at least emailed me before renewing but I had to call to cancel that and I was on hold for a while. Wouldn't have signed up if I knew there was that annoyance to deal with.
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.…
But the claim that no one is intentionally annoying/scamming customers is a bit of a joke. Good businesses don't, and mistakes happen, but a lot of the entries on that site are obviously, consistently screwing their customers (RyanAir, anyone?) There are, in fact, entire businesses that exist to screw unsuspecting customers with rollover billing, data sales, and opt-outs. Among other things, if you're extracting value from customers once each and they don't know your company name, there isn't any consequence to mistreating them.
Broadly, I see three things on that site. There are failures of design and constraint, but there are also dark patterns (where you're basically sincere, but manipulating people with things like opt-outs), and a fair amount of straight-up abuse (where you have victims instead of customers).
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…
A lot of sites using that technique also let you click an X button or click the darkened non-form area to continue. If that's supported, I always choose it as a tiny protest (in hopes that someone actually profiles how click-outs are happening).
If you make users click something obnoxious and self-deprecating to continue, then I'd certainly call that a dark pattern. It's like an incredibly mild version of the cult tactic where you shame people for skepticism.