Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#111

Post by st3v3r » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #97

cle wrote: post #27

One pattern that I consider "dark", but don't see in this list, is using loaded options on a dialog box. One that I often see in apps is like: Rate our app! Those really get under my skin because the developer is clearly trying to play a psychological trick on me, but it's so brazen and obvious that it just pisses me off. And bigger companies do it too (e.g. Google).

There's also the "pre permissions pop up" trick where a dialog that looks almost exactly like the iOS permissions box shows up first, and only THEN does the real one show up if the user "agrees" to accept it. Remember, as an app developer, if a user denies the iOS permissions dialog in your app, you can't EVER show the dialog again -- the user has to manually leave the app and re-enable the permission in the iOS Sett…

Is it a dark pattern, though? You're respecting the user's wishes to not use that permission (ignoring for the moment that you couldn't use it even if you wanted to).

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#112

Post by bigtunacan » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #92

artursapek wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software updates are the rare case where I can forgive it. It's annoying to have clients actively resisting updates, especially security updates.

If it was only about the security update. But in the case of iOS it is not. It's is the opportunity to start the nagging all over again. Please start using iCloud. Let's use Apple Pay now. Let's use Apple Music. On every single minor "security" update...

Even worse; let's break backwards compatibility with your paid software so that you have to purchase an upgrade license... If you've had a Mac long enough and you run paid software you know what I'm talking about. :(

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#113

Post by nodesocket » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:18 PM UTC

Pricing pages are another type of U/I that could be label black hat. Personally, I think the typical pricing "tricks" like anchoring, bundling, freemium are fine and part of running a business.

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#114

Post by Hydraulix989 » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:21 PM UTC

st3v3r wrote: post #111

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the "pre permissions pop up" trick where a dialog that looks almost exactly like the iOS permissions box shows up first, and only THEN does the real one show up if the user "agrees" to accept it. Remember, as an app developer, if a user denies the iOS permissions dialog in your app, you can't EVER show the dialog again -- the user has to manually leave the app and re-enable the permission in the iOS Sett…

Is it a dark pattern, though? You're respecting the user's wishes to not use that permission (ignoring for the moment that you couldn't use it even if you wanted to).

Yes, permission requests should only show up at most once, per Apple, so it is definitely gray area.

Not to mention, the pre permission dialog is usually deceptively similar to the Apple one.

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#115

Post by taneq » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:21 PM UTC

sethbannon wrote: post #12

serg_chernata wrote: post #3

There's no search but I'm curious if LinkedIn is included. I never took screenshots, unfortunately, but I feel like they've had close to 5 in my own experience alone.

Here's the one of the most egregious examples of LinkedIn's dark UX. The transition from "I'm accepting incoming invites" to "I'm inviting people to connect or join LinkedIn" is intentionally subtle: https://goo.gl/photos/ncnTiMWeSBJfg3rZ6

Here's another one I found recently: The email spam they send you is categorised into a bunch of categories. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to each individually. The 'unsubscribe' link at the bottom of the emails sent will unsubscribe you from the first category only, no matter which category the email is from! And the web site doesn't tell you this, it just pops up an almost content-free 'unsubscribed' message. So you keep getting spam until you manually load the site and dig through the settings pages and uncheck the other categories.

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#116

Post by st3v3r » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:21 PM UTC

soared wrote: post #81

TeMPOraL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So maybe we do just need a few big players to step up and change things. The question again is, how to make those big players do something that will lose them money.

Do it in a way that earns them more money. Sounds difficult but that is what adsense did. If legit ux practices earn more, companies will use them. Potential scenario: someone makes a browser plugin that blocks dark patterns as if they were ads, so companies who use them don't see any traction with them. Or 50 years out when everyone is computer literate, users are aware of dark patterns and punish companies who use…

AdSense also had the massive data Google had on users to entice advertisers with. What would entice Google this time?

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#117

Post by nodesocket » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:22 PM UTC

johansch wrote: post #26

My pet peeve: If you add a credit card to the Uber app there is no way to remove it without replacing it with another valid payment method. If you google solutions to this you get third party recommendations to plead with their customer service to have it removed. Seriously? This customer-hostile approach really needs to be killed.

This might seem obvious, but why do you want to have an Uber account with no credit card attached? Usually SaaS require you to have a valid credit card attached always. I don't see the issue.

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#118

Post by nodesocket » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

spennant wrote: post #62

Has anyone tried to ignore iOS updates recently?

These are product updates and often times contain security and stability fixes, nobody is trying to trick you here. Apple is proactively trying to keep their users up to date, I see no problems with this.

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#119

Post by btbuildem » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:24 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #88

artursapek wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a tumblr for that! They call it "confirm shaming". http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/ And yeah, it's UX cancer.

And even Apple is doing it. You you want to update your iphone now or tonight?

I find it insidious how they present the lock screen at that point -- I clicked to dismiss, but they're asking for authorization still.

Re: Dark Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [video]

#120

Post by shostack » Tue, Dec 06, 2016, 10:26 PM UTC

Is there a category for grouping notifications such that spammy notifications are lumped in with other important ones you might want to receive?

Google Photos is a big culprit unfortunately with their photo backup. They keep pinging a notification to get me to remove local versions that are backed up in the cloud. I don't want to do that. The only way to remove the notification seems to be disabling all app notifications.

Worse, when you go into settings, they have a variety of settings that all take you into a deeper level of settings when you click them.

Except "Free up device storage."

Clicking that does not take you to a deeper level as expected (despite looking like a nav tree item), but instead actually does the one thing I didn't want to do, with no confirmation dialogue.