Lecture 03 : Dark Patterns

Finding and documenting two Dark Design Patterns.

This lecture has hag a great echo on me, and has helped me realise how sneaky and insidious Dark Design Patterns truly are.
As for the first example I decided to document, I decided to give you a bit of context on how I came across this Dark Pattern. I recently had to change my laptop and I chose this one :

I chose a french market place to buy it and since it was pretty expensive, I wanted to save as much money as I could. Thus, when I was presented with a cashback offer right before checkout I immediatly wanted to benefit from it.

So, what is exactly happening in this picture ?

Basically, we are told that a partner from the marketplace is offering us a 15€ cashback on our order. The tick box to get it is already clicked and we are kind of comforted by the fact this is offer by an “official” partner of the website. But things get dodgy if you don’t untick that box.

First dodgy thing is that you are going to get redirected to an off-party website. You could think that this may be normal at first, but if you pay close attention to the smalls Conditions & Terms, you will notice that you are actually subscribing to a completely unrelated service for which you will pay more than twice the amount you’re getting refunded, per month. You have actually clicked on an ad and were nearly ripped off of some precious money.

Several french websites have already been sued for these practices, but they claim that they cannot entirely control ads and it is the responsibility of the customer to check for what he’s going to subscribe to. The main problem about this is the fact that the ad is using the website fame to claim credibility for itself. If carefree people don’t thoroughly pay attention they will definetly loose money.

The other Dark Pattern that I’d like to introduce is based on the famous adage : “If it’s free, then you’re the product." As a student, it happens to me quite a lot to try and get as much ressources as I can and if they are free the better. But what truly irritates me is when I try to download an asset and I get the following message :

What’s misleading here is that what you’re downloading is not free but it is branded as such. We often forget the value behind our personal data and this dark pattern takes advantage of it.

Transforming these patterns.

To solve the first Dark Pattern, I’d like to propose the following solution :

As a solution, we truly advertise users that what they are seeing is part of an ad. We also emphasize that this is not a partner’s website and that our customers may need to pay an extra fee for the service they are offered. Furthermore, a pop up could appear if the ad is clicked reminding once more to the user that he is exiting the actual website.

To solve the second one we apply kind of the same strategy, by trying to remind as much as possible that is not a free transaction. We deleted the download and button to replace by a subcribe to download button, once again emphasizing the transaction being made.