Well, this activity certainly wasn’t subtle, even though the article Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI design (2011) claims that subtlety is your friend when trying to deceive users! It took me a long time to get past that first page. Everything about that User Inyerface was frustrating, from having to erase the instructional words to enter your password to having to click on the terms & conditions and watch it scroll ever so slowly to get to the bottom. Of course, I attacked it with the mindset of just doing the opposite of what it is asking so when that tactic only worked some of the time, I determined there was no real rhyme or reason. My favourite page was verifying that I was human by clicking on all the bows.
I fell subject to deceptive UI this week when I clicked on a sale for Taylor Swift Merchandise. First, the website was set up to look exactly like Taylor’s authentic merchandise store. Second, there was a pop-up that had a countdown clock for the sale, which is also common in Taylor’s authentic merchandise store. However, after revisiting the website, I noticed that the countdown clock that had only about 2 minutes left on it when I checked out, had reset back to the original 20 minutes. So, at this point, I’m not very confident that I will get any merchandise arriving in the mail, and whatever does show up, won’t be authentic.
This activity and the reading/videos from this week made me think about the ways in which I design my online courses. There are certain tools I use to force the attention of my students (my users) into preferred behaviours. For example, I have some hidden assignment submission boxes, they are linked to lesson books that must be viewed by the student before the assignment submission box appears.
Tristan Harris’ TED video (2017) is alarming to me. I am well aware of the attention economy of the advertisement business and yet I still fell prey to it. My kids are those kids who give their Snapchat account logins to friends when we go camping and won’t have Wi-Fi, so that they can keep their streaks. While I appreciate that Harris had some suggestions about how to address this attention economy, I feel like the only attainable goal for the average person is the first one, to acknowledge that we are persuadable. The others, listed below, seem a lot bigger than me and my realm of influence.
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- we need to acknowledge that we are persuadable
- we need new models and accountability systems
- we need a design Renaissance
I do hope that policy makers of the world will continue to fight the advertisement and social media giants to make the changes that Harris suggests.
Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. (2011, November 1). A List Apart. https://alistapart.com/article/dark-patterns-deception-vs-honesty-in-ui-design/
TED. (2017, July 28). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | Tristan Harris [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C74amJRp730
