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

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

#171
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn is one of the most common examples when talking about dark patterns, their most famous being the number of ways they tried to get you to invite your gmail contacts.

Airbnb also wants access to your entire Google contacts or Facebook friends list if you want to use the mobile app. Let's just say that I refuse to use their mobile app and only use the desktop/browser version for this reason. You want permission to access my entire contacts/social network? No thanks.

> You want permission to access my entire contacts/social network? No thanks.

Too bad dozens of your contacts did not care about it and they have your data anyway.

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

#172
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 a tumblr for that! They call it "confirm shaming". http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/ And yeah, it's UX cancer.

The crying bear got me laughing. Did someone really pull such a low blow as this?!

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Android, apps can't self rate like that, all they can do is take you to the store page and let you rate their app. The app can't know what rating you gave. Does iOS let apps self rate like that? This seems inconceivable to me. Bottom line: when an app keeps pestering you to rate it, say "Yes fine I'll rate you", they take you to the app store and there, you do nothing (or one-star them). The app should register th…

I think maybe you're not parsing it--they're asking you to rate the app inside the app, with a dialog box created by and owned by the app, and only pushing you to the app store if you're a 4 or a 5. Apps on Android totally can and do do this.

And then you rate again in the app store, this time for real?

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

#174
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another brilliant app rating pattern (perhaps a dark one). A dialog pops up and asks if I loved their app. A "yes" takes me to the marketplace for rating, but a "no" only allows me to send them feedback. It both positively skews the ratings and collects feedback from disgruntled users.

Not necessarily dark though... as an app developer I'd actually really want to hear the feedback from the people who dislike my app. As in any business, oftentimes the most disgruntled customer is the one that can provide the most useful feedback. An even smarter way (in my opinion) of getting 5 star reviews is by showing the dialog only after x hours of use. Users most likely to rate badly will have the app uninstal…

The "dark" part of it is if the dialog doesn't explicitly tell me that it will take me to the App store once I click on one of the buttons.

Otherwise I don't mind such dialog boxes.

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

#175
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Security update? 9.3.4 => 9.3.5? That's an update

9.3.5 => 10.0 is not a "security update".

Constant nagware until you update is asinine. "Update Now or Later?"... f* you, I don't like what I see in 10... but I'm stuck with dancing around daily fucking warnings.

I swear... I'm not bitter :) I also won't buy another iPhone.

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

#176

Does it count if there's no user interface? Amazon has my email address, I've been a customer since the late-nineties. They keep inventing new email lists and signing me up for them. Each time I get a new "newsletter" it says something like, "You got this message because you're subscribed to the 'Tablet News' newsletter." I click the unsubscribe link to remove myself from it. Along with the unsubscribe link there's a…

In general, I'm disappointed how Amazon went from being a store to a "marketplace". Sometimes I want to buy somebody who'll actually curate their list of products and has a reputation to stand behind that they don't want to sully by selling garbage or price-gouging on items they don't normally stock.

But maybe that's just me.

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

#177

Does it count if there's no user interface? Amazon has my email address, I've been a customer since the late-nineties. They keep inventing new email lists and signing me up for them. Each time I get a new "newsletter" it says something like, "You got this message because you're subscribed to the 'Tablet News' newsletter." I click the unsubscribe link to remove myself from it. Along with the unsubscribe link there's a…

I've also experienced this several times. I just went through the wave of shopping emails that come from Black Friday in the US, and found that most of the time I only unsubscribed from the company's "Black Friday" list. It's a shameful way to get around CAN-SPAM.

Companies know there's a risk of unsubscribes with every email they send. If they have several lists, they ought to show all lists you're subscribed to, with an option to unsubscribe from them all. They might actually keep some legitimate subscribers that way.

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

#178

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.

How's that shaming? It's not sayin "Do it later, I'm a lazy bum."

It's not directly shaming, but it presents the user with three options.

1. Comply with whatever they want you to do

2. Lie (say that you are going to comply later without intending to)

3. Walk away from the product (perhaps forever).

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

#179
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).

Related: there's an unfortunate cause of excessive app rating prompts — what's shown in search results/top charts/other areas (on iOS) is the average of the latest version, not the overall aggregate.

If you're at a company that does scheduled releases (e.g. once every three weeks), you'll need to continually ask people to review the app to keep that rating high.

Otherwise you only get ratings from new users and users that are discontent with the particular version. It's rare that people who have already rated the app 5-stars will continually go out of their way to rate the app 5-stars again without prompting.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you're not parsing it--they're asking you to rate the app inside the app, with a dialog box created by and owned by the app, and only pushing you to the app store if you're a 4 or a 5. Apps on Android totally can and do do this.

And then you rate again in the app store, this time for real?

Correct.
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