Tags: deceptive

Harry popped ’round to the Clearleft studio yesterday. It’s always nice when a Clearleft alum comes to visit.

It wasn’t just a social call though. Harry wanted to run through the ideas he’s got for his UX London talk.

Wait. I buried the lede. Let me start again.

Harry Brignull is speaking at this year’s UX London!

Yes, the person who literally wrote the book on deceptive design patterns will be on the line-up. And judging from what I heard yesterday, it’s going to be a brilliant talk.

It was fascinating listening to Harry talk about the times he’s been brought in to investigate companies accused of deliberately employing deceptive design tactics. It involves a lot of research and detective work, trawling through internal communications hoping to find a smoking gun like a memo from the boss or an objection from a beleaguered designer.

I thought about this again today reading Nic Chan’s post, Have we forgotten how to build ethical things for the web?. It resonates with what Harry will be talking about at UX London. What can an individual ethical designer do when they’re embedded in a company that doesn’t prioritise user safety?

It’s like a walking into a jets pray of bullshit, so much so that even those with good intentions get easily overwhelmed.

Though I try, my efforts rarely bear fruit, even with the most well-meaning of clients. And look, I get it, no on wants to be the tall poppy. It’s hard enough to squeeze money from the internet-stone these days. Why take a stance on a tiny issue when your users don’t even care? Your competitors certainly don’t. I usually end up quietly acquiescing to whatever bad are made, praying no future discerning user will notice and think badly of me.

It’s pretty clear to me that we can’t rely on individual people to make a difference here.

Still, I take some encouragement from Harry’s detective work. If the very least that an ethical designer (or developer) does is to speak up, on the record, then that can end up counting for a lot when the enshittification hits the fan.

If you see something, say something. Actually, don’t just say it. Write it down. In official communication channels, like email.

I remember when Clearleft crossed an ethical line (for me) by working on a cryptobollocks project, I didn’t just voice my objections, I wrote them down in a memo. It wasn’t fun being the tall poppy, the squeeky wheel, the wet blanket. But I think it would’ve been worse (for me) if I did nothing.

Over the Edge: The Use of Design Tactics to Undermine Browser Choice - Mozilla Research

It’s a dream team of former Clearlefties: Harry and Cennydd joined forces to investigate and write an in-depth report looking into deceptive design practices used by Microsoft to stop people changing their default browser from Edge. They don’t pull their punches:

We judge that Microsoft cannot justify the use of these techniques, and should stop using them immediately. If they do not, we would welcome – where the law provides for it – regulatory intervention to protect against these harms.

Dark Patterns: We Asked 500+ People How Brands Deceive Them

User research into deceptive design patterns:

Despite our technological advancement and understanding of human nature, it’s still common to see deception in digital products. To understand digital deception (and better define it), we surveyed 536 people to measure and discuss people’s understanding of this matter.

When I was braindumping my thoughts prompted by last week’s UX Fest conference, I wrote about dark patterns.

Well, actually I wrote about deceptive dark patterns. That was a deliberate choice.

The phrase “dark pattern” is …problematic. We really don’t need to be associating darkness with negativity any more than we already do in our language and culture.

This is something I discussed with Melissa Smith after her talk on this topic. The consensus in general seems to be that the terminology is far from ideal, but it’s a bit late to change it now (I’m sure if Harry were coining the term today, he would choose a different phrase).

The defining characteristic of a “dark” pattern is that intentionally deceptive. How about we shift the terminology to talk about deceptive patterns?

Now, I get that inertia is a powerful force and it would be confusing to try do to a find-and-replace on all the resources that already exist on documenting “dark” patterns. So here’s a compromise:

From here on out, let’s start using the adjective “deceptive” in addition to the existing adjective “dark.” That’s what I did in my blog post. I only used the phrase “deceptive dark patterns.”

If we do that consistently, then after a while we’ll be able to drop one of those adjectives—“dark”—and refer to “deceptive patterns.”

Personally I’d love it if we could change the terminology overnight—and I’m quite heartened by the speed at which we changed our Github branches from “master” to “main”—but being pragmatic, I think this approach stands a greater chance of success.

Who’s with me?

Bringing Dark Patterns to Light. Transcript of the speech I gave at the… | by Harry Brignull | Jun, 2021 | Medium

Harry gave a speech at the Federal Trade Commission’s Dark Patterns workshop in April. Here’s the transcript, posted to Ev’s blog.

When I first worked on Dark Patterns in 2010, I was quite naive. I thought that they could be eradicated by shaming the companies that used them, and by encouraging designers to use a code of ethics.

The fact that we’re here today means that approach didn’t work.

Design as (un)ethical illusion

Many, if not all, of our world’s most wicked problems are rooted in the excessive hiding of complexity behind illusions of simplicity—the relentless shielding of messy details in favor of easy-to-use interfaces.

Seams.

But there’s always a tradeoff between complexity, truth, and control. The more details are hidden, the harder it is to understand how the system actually works. (And the harder it is to control). The map becomes less and less representative of the territory. We often trade completeness and control for simplicity. We’d rather have a map that’s easy to navigate than a map that shows us every single detail about the territory. We’d rather have a simple user interface than an infinitely flexible one that exposes a bunch of switches and settings. We don’t want to have to think too hard. We just want to get where we’re going.

Seamful and seamless design are reframed here as ethical and deceptive design:

Ethical design is like a glove. It obscures the underlying structure (i.e. your hand) but preserves some truth about its shape and how it works. Deceptive design is like a mitten. It obscures the underlying structure and also hides a lot about its shape and how it works.

Overlay Fact Sheet

Based on the problems with accessiBe and its ilk, I have signed my name to this:

1. We will never advocate, recommend, or integrate an overlay which deceptively markets itself as providing automated compliance with laws or standards.
2. We will always advocate for the remediation of accessibility issues at the source of the original error.
3. We will refuse to stay silent when overlay vendors use deception to market their products.
4. More specifically, we hereby advocate for the removal of accessiBe, AudioEye, UserWay, User1st, MK-Sense, and all similar products and encourage the site owners who’ve implemented these products to use more robust, independent, and permanent strategies to making their sites more accessible.