Defense Against the Dark Arts

Rick Ells, UW-IT
AccessibleWeb@U Meeting, April 28, 2011

• Approach of this study
  • Dark Patterns Project
    • http://wiki.darkpatterns.org
    • A project led by Harry Brignull (http://www.90percentofeverything.com/)
    • Focuses on examples of user experience design that are misleading, manipulative, or deceptive
    • Provides many of the ideas and examples for this talk
  • Review of a number of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) sites for information on good practices
    • Principles for User Interface Design by Talin
    • Ten Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen
    • Ten Principles of Effective Web Design by Vitaly Friedman
  • Review of several consumer complaint sites. Most focused on the experience of the consumer in the overall business transaction and did not provide much information about deceptive Web designs
• Some Terminology
  • Terminology from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
  • Goals – Strategic objectives
  • Principles – Design characteristics that support goals
  • Patterns – Solutions to common problems encountered when applying principles
• Dark Art Spells and Incantations
  • Dark patterns are coding, design, and layout practices deliberately chosen to mislead the user into doing something other than what they came to do or giving up information they do not need to provide to achieve the purpose of their visit
• So What Does This Have to Do With Accessibility?
  • A person working through assistive technology is even more vulnerable to being misled by dark patterns.
  • It is easy to inadvertantly engage in dark patterns, even if you are a white knight. Being aware of dark patterns can help you avoid them in your own work.
  • If you find yourself feeling indignant as you see these examples, think how you would feel if you had a disability that made it even more difficult to realize you were being manipulated or deceived.
• Let Me Out!
  • Packaged fees, but no simple way to opt-out of specific fees in the package ("I do not want your service plan!")
  • Sign-up online, but canceling requires snail mail to corporate headquarters
  • Automatically signing you up for multiple email lists, while hiding how to select the ones you want or deselect the ones you do not want
• Promises, Promises
  • You are invited to contribute your articles to the site for all to see, but does not mention that fees will be charged to people trying to see them.
  • Promising free access to information, but only giving it to people who register.
  • Saying the information you seek has been found, now please pay upfront to see it. So you pay and the information is not what you asked for.
• Role Swapping
  • Placing one type of question where another typically is located
  • On software download pages, have other "Download" boxes for other software, without clear labelling to distinguish them from the download box of the product
  • Placing “Buy enhanced support plan” checkbox where “Send me marketing email” checkbox is usually located (down by submit button)
• Unitless Offers
  • Recurring fee looks like a single fee
  • Displayed rate is only for first month, subsequent monthly rate is not shown
  • Ambiguous units
  • What is “Weekend rate”? Is that the rate for the whole weekend or for each day in the weekend?
• Forced Continuity
  • Free trial silently rolls over into a periodic charge
  • Turning off the periodic charge requires going to some other site or even contacting the company by other means than the Web
• Intuition Flipping
  • Reverse intuitive questions — “Check if you do not want extra insurance”
  • Opt flipping — Counter intuitive opt-in/opt-out questions — “Do you not want to receive our marketing messages”
• Comparison Squelching
  • Price revealed only on the very last screen, perhaps after you have enter identification and credit card information
  • Only show rates without other fees that will be added
  • Only state prices in the form of “As low as…”
• Whispered Exceptions
  • Exceptions and other qualifications of an offer are at the bottom of the page in low contrast text
  • Such text may be elsewhere in the site in an un-intuitive location, such as in the Statement of Terms and Conditions
• Other Dark Art Power Practices
  • Discontinuities in decision trees so that choices important to the user are not encountered in the course of the interaction
  • Needed information not available in context
  • Misleading high visibility offers, hidden or low visibility qualifications on the offers
  • Massive default opt-ins
  • Hidden paywalls (you are in far enough that you do not want to quit, so you pay)
  • Burying choices that are disadvantageous to the site owner — out of sight, out of mind
• White Art Practices
  • The WCAG 2.0 Four — Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust
  • Empower — Let user know choices up-front so they can make informed choices
  • Decision Points — Present decision options clearly as a set
  • User Perspective — Support user expectations and habits
• When Dark Patterns Are Used By Good Guys
  • The vendor may be aware that customers base their choices on incorrect understandings of the products. For example, many computer vendors do not put the CPU speed up front because now that many computers have multi-core processors, the CPU speed is not a good indicator of responsiveness of applications running on the computer.
  • The buying style of the vendor's customers may be less based on price and more based on the features of the product.
• Defending Against the Dark Arts
  • WCAG and 508 as your technology foundation
  • Build the user interaction based on user expectations and perceptions
  • Keep key choices and information in-path and in-view
  • Give the user control of what is theirs
  • Simplicity, clarity, integrity
  • Design your site to support upfront negotiation of options, a square deal making it clear what has been chosen and its costs, and conclude with a handshake clarifying your commitments to your customer