Dark patterns manipulate or trick users, rather than help them. It’s easy to try and trick your users with your UI, but don’t—it only breeds distrust in both you and the internet.
What Are UX Dark Patterns?
Dark Pattern: A UX pattern used to manipulate a user into an action they do not wish to do.
Dark patterns are what they sound like, they are design patterns, but instead of trying to help the user, they manipulate or trick them in some way. If you understand usability, you can easily trick users into doing things they probably don’t want to do. It goes without saying, we should not trick our users with the UI, it breeds distrust in not only your web app, but the web in general.
When looking for further examples of Dark Patterns online you are bound to run into many Dark Patterns that aren’t necessarily nefarious in nature. As with many things in life, these patterns aren’t black and white, but rather a sliding scale, and it is important to keep that in mind.
So when you see people calling others out for Dark Patterns in the future, take it with a grain of salt. For example UXP2.com calls out Uber for manipulating drivers. They say this one popup uses these three Dark Patterns: Interference, Nagging and Obstruction.
When a driver tries to stop for the day, the Uber app prompts them to continue in order to achieve an arbitrary “goal” for the day. It even goes so far as to highlight the “keep driving” option to make selecting it easier. This takes advantage of a person’s natural desire to “income target”, or set a income goal for the day.
I would argue that they are motivating their Drivers to keep going, using a well known and good pattern of gamification. Yes, the greyed out text is the option they would rather you not do. However, they still provide that option and it is clearly visible and has the same size hit target as the alternative option. Whatever your personal feelings for Uber as a company, I would let them off the hook for this one and say it is neither good nor bad.
#users #dark patterns #ui
