Dark Patterns - User Interfaces Designed to Trick People

I wonder how true that really is. We’ve recently been looking into advertising options for a new service, and to say that the experience we’ve had trying to arrange Facebook and Google ads has been terrible would be very kind to Facebook and Google. I reckon Facebook have lost half the money we’d have spent with them just through UI failures, up to and including literally not being able to place ads sometimes because their pages simply didn’t work. Google have to date lost 100% of the money we were considering giving to them because we couldn’t figure out what we were getting for our money within a reasonable period of time and whether it was likely to have a reasonable RoI compared to our other options.

As a small business, of course we have only so much financial budget to spend across all advertising channels, but we have even less time for busy founders to figure out where to spend it. A simple “Pay this, get that” kind of deal is much more attractive than these vague, auction-based on-line advertising systems where half the numbers they report seem wildly inconsistent from one page to the next. I’m not sure whether those schemes are intended to be a dark pattern or whether they just feel like it because of their inherently vague nature and frequently appalling UI, but they seem pretty close to the line to me.

Ironically, the unclear deal also makes us hesitant to use these services for our own advertising, for fear of effectively becoming unwelcome advertisers ourselves. I loathe spammers as much as anyone, and on top of that we operate in a relatively small and very social market, so not knowing whether we’re showing marketing material to people who are actually likely to be interested is a big turn-off for us. So I guess as well as being another possible example of a dark pattern, this is also an example of poor UI clearly decreasing revenues rather than increasing them.

Lets say you have two airlines that both need to offer a flight for $300 in order to make a reasonable profit. If one shifts $15 of that cost to bag fees, then people will choose that one even though the end cost is the same. The other airlines have to follow suit or they will fail to stay competitive.

If the dark patterns empirically work, then a market context shift is necessary.

> We already have a market place where people who feel tricked or duped will have a lower opinion of the company doing the duping. dark patterns have a bad edge to them too--very few of them, when noticed by the user, leave the user actually feeling good about how they were duped.

If they had enough of a "bad edge" that they didn't actually work to increase the returns realized by a business--then they wouldn't be an issue, as there'd be no incentive to use them.

How does a new and unexperienced customer at Ryanair feel when he sees the final amount he has to pay? It's obviously a good first conversion, but does it pay off a the second and third etc conversion for ryanair? Does he recommend the service?

He has other choices and the one that tricked him doesn't feel that good anymore...

Ergo: ryanair is optimizing short term conversion.

Ryanair is trap upon trap. Radiobuttons and checkboxes all over the place, and if you forget to confirm not wanting a bag you have to start over on that page and hit all the right settings again. Multiply that five-six times...

(And I wouldn't be surprised if Parsons and O'Leary are buddies.)