Also stop letting marketplace sellers email me begging for feedback after every marketplace item I accidentally order. I try my best to not order marketplace seller items anymore but when I accidentally do (or buy a gift for someone that is only offered this way) I always end up getting emails from these guys. Are you sharing my email address with them? Does unsubscribing or responding to them share my email address with them? I have no idea. There is never anything useful and it's impossible to unsubscribe from all past and future marketplace emails which is really annoying. Come on, amazon, I really want to love you and continue shopping there but it's getting to the point that I'd rather go to wal-mart! (ok not really)
But maybe that's just me.
I love the Amazon marketplace. (I also hate the 3rd party seller feedback emails but I have strict email filters so who cares)
I am a seller on Amazon. I didn't think I have access to email addresses but you got me curious. I just went into an order and clicked "contact buyer." It gives a contact form that has the receivers address as something like dq22t5nz9n27qma@marketplace.amazon.com with a note "IMPORTANT NOTICE: When you submit this form, Amazon will replace your email address with one provided by Amazon in order to protect your identity, and forward the message on your behalf. Amazon will retain copies of all e-mails sent and received using this service, including the message you submit below, and may review these messages as necessary to resolve disputes. By using this service, you consent to this action."
Personally, I don't contact my buyers at all ever unless its a reply to a question they asked me.
On the email front, I've been getting bizarre emails from Trulia about 1-2 times a month for the last six months. I don't open them but the subject is "1 new rental available in $(my town)." I own a house and I don't remember giving Trulia my email address ever even when I was apartment hunting many years ago. This only started six months ago. I wonder how I got on that list?
But really the problem got so bad I had to stop using gmail alltogether.
Moved over to mail.yandex.com and now I do not get interrupted anymore in my life.
Thank you email and IM and "notifications" but no thank you, if I ever receive a notification of any kind, that account will either get nuclear delete option or disabled forever.
Time to move to new email providers and new emails, and stop pretending email address is an ID, because its not, its a mailbox, when it gets full create a new one, and only people you care about and when you care will receive its attention.
Companies know there's a risk of unsubscribes with every email they send. If they have several lists, they ought to show all lists you're subscribed to, with an option to unsubscribe from them all. They might actually keep some legitimate subscribers that way.
I've begun adding 1-star reviews when I get requests begging for feedback. Seems like the only thing I can do to discourage the behavior
Did you try unsubscribing from all their newsletters?
Rate our app!
<OK> <Not Yet>
http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/
And yeah, it's UX cancer.
Heck, I even uninstalled every jwz package from my Debian systems after the xscreensaver fiasco.
An even smarter way (in my opinion) of getting 5 star reviews is by showing the dialog only after x hours of use. Users most likely to rate badly will have the app uninstalled before the dialog shows.
Do you like our app?
<Yes, rate it> <Later>
I bet they take your one star and just hide the dialog, but take people who rate it as 5 stars to the "real" app store rating page.
edit: Some of us do not want to enable this power-draining, privacy-sucking global option just to use Tinder. An xposed framework module was created to bypass the check, but Tinder has actually begun checking for it and the app doesn't work properly if it is enabled.
Google is notorious for it, especially when they try to get you to use the YouTube app rather than the web interface.
It's not "maybe later" I want—it's "never ask me again".
The worse, if you agree, it enables the location service for everything all the time where you have the feeling it was just for the Maps app.
I just discovered that 2 days ago and I must say I was really really angry at Google for this clear dark pattern use.
Even if that's not true, I may never visit the page again if my perception is that it's gearing up to annoy me.
I will often see: OK, NOT YET, DON'T SHOW AGAIN. Which I think is fine.
Remember, as an app developer, if a user denies the iOS permissions dialog in your app, you can't EVER show the dialog again -- the user has to manually leave the app and re-enable the permission in the iOS Settings.
Successive calls to the function to ask permission automatically return false for "denied" so it is in the developer's best interest to try to avoid showing the real iOS permission pop up unless the user somehow indicates that they are going to accept the permission (in this case, in the "pre permission" clone dialog).
There's even GitHub projects and CocoaPods for this: https://github.com/yahoo/YMPromptKit
When I used this "trick" (yes, I'm guilty), only a handful of thousands of users actually accepted the soft-prompt and then successively denied the real iOS hard prompt.
Done properly I can appreciate it, especially on Android where permissions are often nonsensically bundled together. Although I'm never sure when it's crossed the line into scam. Is the permission for getting the user's gamer id really "make phone calls"?!
App developer insisted upon a review, so they got one.
If you're at a company that does scheduled releases (e.g. once every three weeks), you'll need to continually ask people to review the app to keep that rating high.
Otherwise you only get ratings from new users and users that are discontent with the particular version. It's rare that people who have already rated the app 5-stars will continually go out of their way to rate the app 5-stars again without prompting.
It had a [don't ask me again] checkbox that when set greyed out the option to disagree.
My only nitpick: the author wants the industry to agree on a "code of ethics."
Unfortunately, such exhortations strike me as naive. They are unlikely to work, because the truly bad actors will continue to use dark patterns regardless, putting pressure on all other actors to follow suit. The key challenge is not in getting the good actors to do the right thing, but in preventing the bad actors from doing the wrong thing.
Meanwhile, even sophisticated consumers like HN members pay a cognitive or financial cost to deal with dark patterns every day, which are prevalent throughout the web. Everyone I know is sick and tired of this crap.
The only viable solution I can think of is regulation in the form of a consumer-protection agency, working with the industry, that can fine bad actors up the wazoo.
Does anyone here have a better suggestion?
The question again is, how to make those big players do something that will lose them money.
[1]:https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
[2]:https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-badger/pke...
[3]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-badge...
So we can have more "This website uses cookies, okay?!?!?" banners popping up all over the place? No thanks.
Besides, do you really want a bureaucrat telling you how to design your web site, with penalties enforceable by law?
If they push the envelope too hard, you report, they follow up and can potentially pull the cert. Maybe have browser integration too. (But good luck disambiguating between this and SSL certs for the average person...)
If I'm a developer (say, a junior engineer with my first real entry-level software engineering job out of college), my direct manager (who generally supervises and stringently handholds) basically tells me exactly which features need to be implemented (and often, even how).
I don't have much of a say in which patterns (dark or light) get implemented, and I probably won't have the gull to "stand up" and "rock the boat" as a 22 year old fresh out of school.
It's even worse if I'm married with kids... How do I explain to my wife and children why I lost my job for refusing to implement the product guys' ill-conceived version of "Roach Motel" in the frontend?
This is why I sympathize with the VW lowly engineer "fall guy" whose head met the chopping block for the entire pervasive executive diesel cheat scandal.
I think this would be much harder to pass, and would be more akin to financial advisers being required to be fiduciaries, but hey, that is now required in the US. What is required for that to happen is mainline support though. But that will be difficult to get. I think this is, like the privacy stuff, is a little too abstract for the average person.
Currently, if you want to use LinkedIn you have to either use their website. Sometimes there are 3rd party options that consume the API but in the current model of the web, as soon as one of those 3rd parties is seen as problematic then API access is typically revoked or restricted to give power back to the company.
In the public data model the data and API are publicly exposed and cannot be arbitrarily restricted. In the LinkedIn case this would allow a 3rd party to build a new UX on top of the LinkedIn database that excludes the copious dark patterns. Under this model, companies who abuse their users risk getting displaced by an alternate application backed by the same data that favors the user.
- Disclaimer: I work pretty much exclusively developing software in the Ethereum ecosystem which is one such blockchain based platform.
A code of ethics would be 100x more effective than this, and still be ineffective.
First up is microphone, and you click allow. Second is camera, and you click allow. Third is contacts, and you click—wait a minute, why do you need this? Disallow.
Don't know what they would do if they got my contacts (hopefully not spam them like LinkedIn), and don't intend to find out.
You want permission to access my entire contacts/social network? No thanks.
A company that tries to be clear on everything is Google, but I still find they morph so rapidly that their documentation is often 2 or 3 generations behind.
And the linked article to it: https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...
Do you love our app?
Yes No
| |
| |
______ ______
Opens Does
AppStore Nothing
Dark patterns don't represent anything truly sinister, and in most cases they are perfectly legal. They are just bad UX because they're dishonest about their intent.
A sneaky one I saw recently is something like:
[ ] Subscribe to newsletter about our services by unchecking this box.
(It doesn't matter whether the box is initially checked or not, the user will be tricked into the desired behavior.)
I don't remember the exact phrasing, and it was much more shrewd than my own, but it relied on a boolean flipping of the value of the checkbox towards the end of the field label. Any user seeding the start of the sentence will leave it in its current state.
A few years ago RyanAir's website was much worse. It's actually usable now!
I was somehow able to buy a freaking bag with my ticket. I'm surprised they didn't somehow trick me to buy their lottery too. And I'm tech savvy...
Well, in a semi-ideal world, there would be a comprehensive "hall of shame" database containing the information about the tricks, problems, dark patterns, etc. for all websites. Then, some helper apps or browser extensions could warn us about these issues while a regular user is browsing.
One of the problems with this idea is that it gives a huge authority to the owner of that database and there would be lots of questions about its neutrality.
Google Photos is a big culprit unfortunately with their photo backup. They keep pinging a notification to get me to remove local versions that are backed up in the cloud. I don't want to do that. The only way to remove the notification seems to be disabling all app notifications.
Worse, when you go into settings, they have a variety of settings that all take you into a deeper level of settings when you click them.
Except "Free up device storage."
Clicking that does not take you to a deeper level as expected (despite looking like a nav tree item), but instead actually does the one thing I didn't want to do, with no confirmation dialogue.
Is any automated system more important than your focus?
What I have is, disallow or delete the app or "service" as soon as I receive a "notification" from it, only my wife and family is allowed to light up the led on my phone.
Ever received a spam email, hunted for the unsubscribe link, and found it in light grey, against a white background? Imagine how much worse that is for someone with low vision. Ditto for pop-up ads with a tiny grey X in the corner.
Many of the dark patterns described in the video rely on hiding/obfuscating opt-outs and these have an even bigger impact on people with visual/processing disabilities.
I'm really getting tired of turning down Amazon Prime on Amazon. I use Amazon less because of this. There are about three extra pages of Amazon Prime ads to click through for every purchase.
I didn't see it in the agreement (actually went back and looked for something that would cover ads), and it's not clear what limits, if any, they think there are. That is, could they just decide to show as many ads as Hulu and say "yeah, we said you could have access to this catalog. we didn't say it would be ad-free".
I was on vacation recently and the room had DirecTV. I tried searching for a program and all the search results were for channels not subscribed. Several of the channels in the guide list were presented as if subscribed, but then when a show would start, would prompt to charge $6 to continue watching and the show would stop after a few minutes. Finally, I found a channel that was subscribed and not PPV, and when an ad came on 30 seconds later, I tried to turn off the DirecTV box.
Here's the DirecTV dark pattern: there was a "Please Wait..." message on the screen while the ad played instead of just turning off the output! How can anybody actually be making money from TV ads when they are so obnoxious?
I'm pretty sick of corporations double-dipping in every industry. Video services charge you for watching, and then sell you to advertisers. Supermarkets charge you for products, and then sell you to manufacturers. ISPs charge you for bandwidth, and then try force video services to pay as well. Where's the exit to this hall of mirrors?
They do have a few programs on there that are not eligible, but then they say up front "due to streaming rights, we have to show you ads, but it's just one before and one after".
That, at least is better than the ad-laden Hulu before they offered that option, where any prolonged bout of streaming would show you the same ad over and over and over.
Despite being a good site, it has been last updated in 2013: http://darkpatterns.org/whats-new/
I sent them 2 dark patterns in the past which they didn't put; in an email I received long time after inquiring about it one of the developers said they're under the pump and will get to it sometime. And they don't.
http://darkpatterns.org/trick-questions/
Good luck figuring that out though, since the what's new page hasn't been working in pretty much forever and the only way to see if something has been changed is to check each category individually.
And yeah, it doesn't update much. I remember sending in my own examples before, and those never got added either. Kind of wish there was a site about this with a more regular update schedule or something.
I may stay away from LA Fitness just because of this article.
In a way I kind of like that model - just not on an airplane.
I suspect this works better on people who sign up and then never show up for four months.
I will never fly spirit again, though. They just straight up cancelled a flight of mine an hour and a half before the flight for literally no reason, I got no notification via email/text or phone until I went to the airport to check my baggage (another thing I hate doing, but I was traveling for a pool tournament and you can't carry pool cues on a plane...). I had to book a last minute flight with another airline and my total airfare ended up being almost double what I paid for spirit.
I dispute this. I work with someone who is a marketing person and very much drawn to dark pattern rubbish. Most recent incident is a good example - a sales promotion where something is added to the cart if the customer buys a certain product. I pointed out that this was a 'dark pattern' and made sure my boss knew that such an idea is illegal in the E.U.
For me the illegality is not something that scares me, I doubt I will go to jail for writing the code, however, using a 'dark pattern' is a problem for me.
I like to think that I am a customer focused person, my marketing clown certainly is not. In fact he cares not one iota about any of the customers, his world view is selfish.
So, I point out the illegal aspect, next thing is that he wants the items given away. I don't see how that makes our products look good and I have no idea how to make money out of making a product and then shipping it to them for free. So again I am not sold on the priority of the project.
Returning to the 'selfish' aspect, my marketing clown does not code or appreciate the effort involved in making the auto-add work. I can do the code for that and think I could get the MVP of it done in a day, with some testing after that. Then there is the thinking through of the unintended consequences - I imagine that we would get plenty of customer service emails if there was a problem with the offer. The UX is also not thought out. I am sure that I could spend all day getting the message to the customer sorted on the website and emails, but if I didn't do that then the whole thing would certainly be 'dark pattern'.
There is nothing clever about my selfish marketing clown and his naive ways. However, he gets a performance bonus based on 'customer acquisition' metrics that the rest of us don't get. He has an interest to not care about anything other than his Google Analytics nonsense, customers, rest of the team, the company making money matters not.
Although anecdotal, this is how 'dark patterns' happen - marketing clowns, their selfish ways, their inability to understand the problem space (because they don't do code or customers) and workplace bullying make these things persist.
* Do I check the item if I want to unsubscribe from it?
* Or do I uncheck the items I don't wish to receive?
50-50 chance -- which I'm sure they love. Clicking "Update" gives no feedback either, just reloads the page.
I know it sounds silly, but this is how a lot of decisions are agreed upon by many large organizations, and help encourage involvement and following the rules. See W3, ICANN, ESRB, IETF, etc.
The "BUXE", or Board for User eXperience Ethics (just my name idea) could be founded by a group of consenting UX designers, companies, and organizations. Together they would vote on and establish UX design principles that would be up for review every year or so.
The BUXE will accept fees for reviewing a website's adherence to their ethics and would give ratings to them based on how well they follow the guidelines. The resulting site can then publish their BUXE rating on their site.
Individual developers could be given honor status if they are particularly vocal or involved in ensuring the development of ethical UX that could be accolades for them to brag about (something important to developers). It's a good resume booster, anyway.
Plenty of other ideas.
When this type of UI disappears from the internet, then you will know that the majority of consumers agree with your viewpoint. Until then, people keep buying those insurance upgrades, and not caring(if they cared, we wouldn't be in this situation).
If it all seems glib, that's because it is glib. People are taking advantage of other people, just below the threshold where those victims care enough to do something about it. This is the world we live in. I'm not sure how to end this on a positive note.
In a situation where you are legally compelled to buy insurance and essentially all providers do this that's completely wrong.
These are usually found in ads, or notices like the New York Times puts up notifying you there are only so many free articles left.
I think of this as a gray pattern usually, as it is designed to keep the source of revenue going to fund the sight you are currently reading. It's a surprisingly effective innovation.
I've thought of this with the mobile revolution. You could never have introduced total device lock down and ubiquitous telemetry so easily in the PC era. There would have been an outcry. But change the form factor...
Edit: Take a look at how any Stable/LTS Linux disto handles this. If a bunch of hackers can do it on such a diverse software stack, surely the company with the largest cash reserves in the world can figure out how to do it on a software/hardware stack they control completely.
That's what got me, after the hundredth time it had appeared I clicked the X instead of . It the tactics of criminals.
This customer-hostile approach really needs to be killed.
5105105105105100 and 4111111111111111 might be better alternatives (other test numbers that also pass the luhn check).
I ended up using my bank's "virtual credit card" service to create a virtual CC with a balance of 1 SEK to get rid of my Uber account. Anyway, I think this is shameful of them.
I would be ashamed of this practice if I worked for them. There is no excuse. You can't blindly blame it on A/B evaluations and what ended up making the company the most money. It's simply unethical.
It is frustrating as fuck.
For an example join newsletter pop ups you get on websites. I assume everyone pisses off and closes them, or do they?
Think of it as similar to the mall kiosk people -- they dont care if you are offended, you probably would never have bought their product anyways.
Also similar to spammers who now send emails that are so stupid that you think no one would ever click them -- except the small number of people who are so naive that they do -- which is what they are trying to select for.
Which points to age old problem of any public network: spam.
This may vary on the audience and my anecdata is where N = 5~ devs.
http://darkpatterns.org/maxcdn-com-may-2013/ - the $10 arises because the option for including edge servers in Asia is selected
http://darkpatterns.org/british-airways-distract-from-cheape... - I'm pretty skeptical that this had any malicious intent. It is showing the cheapest option in the column. Often the customer will already know which class they want to fly in, so it helps them to be able to skim down a column looking for the cheapest option.
http://darkpatterns.org/papa-johns-iphone-app-november-2011/ - I think this is seriously reaching. Every single pizza chain (both online & in-store) work this way. They do a lot to point you in the direction of their offers page too.
http://darkpatterns.org/directline-com-july-2010/ - Hilarious. If this website had any idea how much negative impact price comparison sites have had on car insurance in the UK, they'd be praising Direct Line for not lowering themselves to the tactics of all the other insurers (offering an incredibly unprofitable first year rate, then massively increasing pricing when you renew)
I'm sure there are more - these are the most clear ones after skimming through about half of the categories.