Friday words #308

By | May 13, 2022

I don’t use ride-sharing apps often. But not long ago we were at the airport late at night and needed a ride home, so I brought up a ride-share app on my phone. After I’d entered my details, a screen came up that showed me an option for some sort of premium ride service. The screen had two buttons for my choices: Upgrade or Cancel ride.

I hesitated, and perhaps you can see the issue here. Did I want to cancel this ride? No, I didn’t want to cancel my ride; I just didn’t want a premium upgrade. But that wasn’t one of the available options.  As it turns out, the Cancel ride option apparently is how you cancel the premium upgrade and “return” to the normal one. (I guess?)

It’s confusing! But this confusion is the point. It’s an example of something I recently learned the name for: a dark pattern. A dark pattern, according to the Deceptive Design site, consists of “tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn’t mean to, like buying or signing up for something.” Like signing up for a premium upgrade because it’s unclear how not to. 

The term dark pattern was coined in 2010 by the UX (user experience) expert Harry Brignull, who’s got a PhD in cognitive science. It’s Brignull who runs the Deceptive Design site.

A simple example of a dark pattern that many people have probably encountered is the set of “sign me up for …” checkboxes that you see when you order something—checkboxes that are selected by default:

Checkbox with label 'I would like to receive updates, special offers, and other promotions'.

Another example of a dark pattern is sometimes called Roach Motel, based on the slogan for an old insecticide device: “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out!” I experienced this not long with the Nextdoor site. I originally signed up for this years ago. (Before I knew what I was in for on that site, gah.) Several moves later, that login isn’t relevant to me, and I don’t want to update to my current location. But how do you cancel your account? You can search high and low on their site (I did) to find this, but you never will. Because the only way to delete your account is to send an email to their customer service department telling them to do that. I learned this finally from an article on the DeleteMyData site that shows the process:

Draft email in which the subject line is 'DELETE MY ACCOUNT'.

I’ve had similar issues with trying to cancel a magazine subscription or to cancel auto-pay for something: it’s always simple to sign up or subscribe, but you often have to run a gantlet of actual people to try to get yourself back out. Heck, it’s so hard that maybe you’ll just give up. It’s a dark pattern.

People who have gone looking for software tools or utilities on the web might have encountered another version of a dark pattern. You go to a page where you can download the tool, and there’s a prominent download button (often green) on the page. But the biggest, most prominent, greenest download button is often for something different, usually some sort of junkware, if not something more sinister. The real download link is smaller and more hidden. Here’s an example I copied from an article about this pattern:[1]

Web page with a big green button labeled 'Start Download' and a smaller gray button labeled 'Download'.

I encountered the term dark pattern in an article about TurboTax, the tax-preparation software. As Americans know, our tax system is a mess, requiring a bunch of work to calculate taxes and exemptions and filling out annoyingly long forms. Or paying a person or company—like, say, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax—to do it for you.

It turns out that Americans could have a simpler tax-return system. But basically, in return for the government not simplifying the process, companies like Intuit made a deal that they would provide free tax-filing services for the large number of people whose taxes are pretty simple.

Free, that is, if you can figure out on the TurboTax site how to get it. The company advertises a free product, but it also uses dark patterns on its website to get people to opt into upgrades that end up costing money. The company might have agreed in principle to offer free tax prep to Americans, but it’s certainly not in their interest to actually have people use that free service. As it says in a Wired article, “the company that makes an app or site has different priorities than the person using it.” So, dark patterns. (You can read all about what an incredible scam the tax-prep industry is in this eye-opening ProPublica article.)

The Deceptive Design site has explanations and examples (a “hall of shame“) of many different types of dark patterns, which I’ve found fascinating in an infuriating way. There’s also a good video that illustrates a variety of dark patterns, including how a game company uses the “green button” dark pattern to trick you into an in-app purchase:

But at least I know now that if I somehow end up subscribing to something and then can’t seem to find a way to unsubscribe (to name but one example of unwanted services), it’s not because I’m dumb—it’s because there are people out there creating these dark patterns to try to snag me into doing exactly what they want.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.

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[1] I went looking for examples of this—I’ve certainly encountered the pattern myself in the past—but after a couple of browser warnings about possible malware, I decided I’d just rely on this screenshot. [^]