Dark patterns are everywhere, these are tricks used by applications and websites to make users do things they don’t want to. They rely on exploiting our behavioural biases and cognitive limitations. We all encounter dark patterns in our daily lives, like making it easy to subscribe but hard to unsubscribe, pre-selecting actions like purchasing insurance, offering tips, payment methods etc., some e-commerce platforms “sneak” new items that you didn’t choose just before the payment step, hiding or obscuring important details, using scary and fearful language and more.
In this conversation, Ashish Aggarwal (head of public policy at NASSCOM), Kailash Nadh (CTO at Zerodha) and Bhuvanesh R (Zerodha) discuss how dark patterns are harmful to users and the kind of regulations that must surround them.
Some highlights from the conversation
Dr. K
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Dark patterns; the word itself is rather new. I think just about a decade old. But in really simple terms, it’s a user interface digital surface term. When a user interface employs trickery and tricks users into doing something that they didn’t really have the intention to do that’s a dark pattern.
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In the dial-up, in the old internet era things that were seen as a menace today have become industry standard practices. So that is the transition that black patterns as a thing has undergone over the last 20 or 25 years.
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Dark patterns and not coincidently are always employed in the context of financial gains. Wherever there’s no money or financial transaction you typically do not tend to see a so-called dark pattern. And I think that’s then explained by a simple matter of incentives if there’s a financial incentive if there’s a financial gain to be made by increasing the size of a certain kind of button and reducing the size of another kind of button that seems like an obvious incentive to a lot of organizations who primary incentive is to make money.
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I use software written by other people every day, built by other companies every day and people use software that I have written and our organization has built. So the common sense understanding translates really well. If you don’t want to be annoyed if you find some of these practices deceptive or annoying, how could you, in the right conscience, employ those same practices in your line of work? So to me, it’s that simple, common sense principle.
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This whole metric-based view of anything is problematic. It could be the right metric to begin with, but metrics don’t exist in isolation, especially in complex businesses and services. A lot of metrics really have to play together, and you have to look at everything together and not in isolation to make meaningful decisions
Ashish
- In an offline world, you are in a proper 3D environment—your senses are assessing everything, then you move to a laptop world where you have a screen in front of you and now you are on this mobile and a consumer is always in a rush so let’s click and go ahead. In that kind of environment, I think a dark pattern has a serious implication
- If I got a really targeted ad that was very useful for me I wouldn’t think of it as spam but because I get ads which are not relevant and I get only 5% of ads maybe which are relevant I start worrying about it and then I start thinking about spam and all of that stuff and because of this clunkiness in various processes where it is also about customer targeting, customer retention and then you trying to make up for lack of at times genuine understanding of consumer or genuine quality or you are trying to make up for lack of processes at your end to employ certain things which are unethical and or deceptive to still meet your business outcomes and that’s what is dark pattern in some sense.
- There are other things beyond the dark patterns which we are discussing today and this is especially relevant let’s say in the case of children. So today, if you’re again using your phone, then you open any of the social media sites and once you start scrolling, you will not stop scrolling, the next video will start, the next thing will start; the next reel will start; and maybe as an adult, it’s okay; I mean, an adult has to take a decision but for a child, this could be something; maybe a child is not able to take a decision, and it could have some detrimental impact on the child’s understanding and the way he utilizes time.
- A lot of this starts from product design, and it kind of anchors into the outcomes that you are chasing. Are those outcomes short-term outcomes in some sense or are they meaningful outcomes for the end consumer, if you focus on the meaningful outcomes for the end consumer even if you employ patterns, these will be positive nudges most likely and not nudges which are out to deceive you as a consumer.
- Typically let’s say there are 10 businesses. Three of them are very good, they don’t want to use dark patterns, and seven of them are like, “Okay, fine, we don’t care so much.” Now, for these three people, it becomes very difficult to stick to the idea of not doing a dark pattern because if there’s no regulation and there’s no action, then they’re hoping in hell that the customers will be smart enough and will reward these three as against the seven and this timeframe may not be the timeline during which we are measuring this potential outcome, could actually be make and break for a startup.
Full transcript of this conversation is available here: