Thanks to a great travel deal, you plan a fun-filled holiday for your family. You book affordable plane tickets online for your loved ones, hurry everyone to the airport five hours early, check-in your carefully weighed luggage, and excitedly enter the flight - only to realise that your cranky toddler has been seated right in front of the toilet while you are ten rows away and everyone else in your family is scattered throughout the flight. When you angrily complain to the airline, they claim you should have paid extra at the time of booking in order to ensure your seats were placed together.
You do recall seeing that option on the website right before paying for the plane tickets, but you skipped it because it entailed spending much more money than what the deal promised.
Now, as your entire family lambasts you for your poor planning, you can take comfort in knowing that you were the victim of a deceptive user interface online known as a dark pattern or a deceptive pattern.
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When the internet plays tricks
User experience (UX) designer Harry Brignull is credited with coining the term ‘dark pattern’ back in 2010, but it is used in European and American regulatory proceedings even today to describe the unethical practices of companies ranging from local travel websites to social media or cloud giants that manipulate their user interfaces with design techniques in order to get internet users to spend more money than they normally would, make decisions that are not in their best interest, or give up when doing something that goes against the company’s aims.
Deceptive Patterns: Exposing the tricks tech companies use to control you is Brignull’s book that serves as a guide for audiences ranging from casual internet users to antitrust lawyers subpoenaing Big Tech giants, in order to help them recognise the obstructive patterns they encounter every day and learn how to tackle them in the future.
Deceptive Patterns builds on the work Brignull has carried out for over a decade now - naming and shaming the tricky design practices used by well-known companies worldwide - on the basis of complaints and screenshots shared with him by social media users. According to his website, some common offenders include Google, Microsoft, Meta, Adobe, and even Quora. In India, some named and shamed companies included IndiGo and Amazon India.
The sheer research and analysis required to even outline Brignull’s self-published 2023 book is a Herculean project for anyone to take on, as it considers the internet’s evolution in the past twenty or so years and its ongoing collision with profit-hungry businesses using a greater number of automated tools. However, Brignull steers the reader through these turbid digital waters with ease, covering Big Tech misdemeanours and the regulation of deceptive patterns in the western world along with solid examples and case studies of common deceptive patterns.
Going a step further, Brignull breaks down many of the unsavoury internet encounters you have surely experienced in the past. A newsletter subscription that forces you to click ‘I don’t want to be healthy’ or ‘I don’t care about saving money’ in place of the simple ‘I do not wish to subscribe,’ is termed “Confirm Shaming.” A website that flashes messages such as “Only 1 left in stock!” or “Sale ending in 9:59 minutes!” is using your own urgency against you. A news website that forces you to go through pages and pages of settings in order to turn off trackers and cookies before you can read a single article is using “Visual Interference.” A website selling skin serums and featuring praise from faceless users with names like ‘Neha’ and ‘Ankita’ is using likely fake testimonials.
Taking the plane ticket example from earlier, the user was a victim of what is called “Hidden Costs.” These lure you in with a deal or a low price before adding multiple extra fees at the last minute to pressure you into going ahead with the transaction.
“Today, design is far less about how you decorate things, and far more about how you persuade and influence people into doing things,” Brignull writes. “It’s mainly about tracking, testing, psychology, behavioural economics, statistics and empirical scientific research. In other words, it’s all about achieving business goals and making money.”
Dissecting these deceptive patterns one by one, Brignull shows us how they take advantage of people who may be suffering from time poverty due to busy and stress-filled lives, or how they can exploit vulnerable internet users such as children or seniors.
Furthermore, many of the deceptive patterns themselves are a sham. Take the countdown timer on many e-commerce websites that serves only to hassle internet shoppers and nudge them into hasty purchases. Brignull investigates these to show us how such timers are usually plug-ins or apps used by sellers to hurry up their shoppers; the countdown usually resets and begins once more as soon as time runs out, without affecting the price of the product.
Zooming out, Brignull covers how deceptive practices harm the marketplace at large, making it harder for smaller or more honest businesses to build a customer base because their users are trapped in larger and more toxic ecosystems where they struggle to delete accounts, end their subscriptions, or recover their lost payments.
While it contains a goldmine of information for internet users worldwide, Deceptive Patterns can be a rather uneven read and one that is at times hard to finish. Brignull’s narrative style rapidly switches between conversational and informative based on the topics he is covering in each chapter - and the transition isn’t always smooth.
While the individual case studies and ‘naming and shaming’ sections are thoroughly enjoyable to breeze through, the chapters that deal with legislation are densely packed with lists and summaries of various legal articles restricted to the EU and the U.S. While this information is necessary for readers, a less drastic shift from the more practical aspects of the book to its more theoretical sections would have helped the pace as well as the flow. Some graphics could have also enhanced the sections dealing with legal procedures across jurisdictions.
Even so, it is clear that Brignull has invested a great deal of effort in making the U.S. and EU-based digital regulations welcoming to readers worldwide, so they can draw parallels with their own countries’ legislation, use the information as a starting point to carry out research of their own, or even spark an animated conversation about deceptive patterns in their own workplace.
“The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) 1 was adopted back in 2005, and it doesn’t get talked about much, despite its potency. It’s a bit like the elderly grey-haired character in a martial arts movie whom everyone ignores, but in the third act they turn out to be a total powerhouse who packs an incredible punch, “ Brignull writes, before diving into the directive’s salient features and their links to real-life deceptive patterns we see even today.
The author then comes to his own experience as an expert witness in lawsuits concerning deceptive patterns, and suggests ways for the industry to move forward. This makes for a far more intriguing read and reveals several useful tools that both readers and designers can also try out to understand digital design processes and brand methodologies.
A brief section on the emergence of generative AI-powered webpages and UI design - and the risks of the same - brings the book to its last pages and leaves the reader to chew on the implications.
On compassion and integrity
What is most delightful in Brignull’s Deceptive Patterns is that despite authoring a book about UX/UI encounters, digital regulation, online design failures, and corporate greed, Brignull’s scholarship is filled with care and compassion.
He urges the world to take action against the deceptive patterns most internet users are only beginning to recognise, but he raises urgent awareness without veering into alarmist territory.
Even beyond its friendly and personable narrative style, the author takes an intersectional approach to researching deceptive patterns. He looks at its impact on second-language English speakers, internet users from low-income households, and people with disabilities. He further acknowledges that his earlier use of the phrase ‘dark patterns’ to deride deliberately poor design choices was not an inclusive approach and instead pushes for the wider use of the term ‘deceptive patterns.’
Readers are lucky to have an empathetic author like Brignull, who holds himself accountable when necessary. He encourages academic self-reflection as well as sensitivity for our fellow citizens of the internet age. He urges internet users to hold companies responsible for their deceptive practices instead of relying solely on our own intelligence or the company’s professed innocence.
“Self-regulation is a way to let an industry carry on doing the same profitable thing as before while pretending to adhere to some new rules,” Brignull writes, when weighing options to combat deceptive patterns such as regulating companies, customer-led shaming, educating customers, or enforcing “bright” patterns instead of deceptive ones.
Brignull posted on X this January that he chose to self-publish his book because traditional publishers wanted him to sign an agreement to pay their legal fees in case he was ever sued. He said they otherwise wanted him to cut out the real-world examples of deceptive patterns entirely in his book, just to be safe.
Brignull called these real-life cases the “best bits,” and decided to self-publish. He said this decision helped him maintain the integrity of the content, and we certainly see the merit of this argument.
However, one major downside to self-publishing is that the paperback version of Deceptive Patterns is extremely costly for Indian users who buy it through Amazon, unless a local publisher or a distributor makes it available at an affordable price.
For now, the e-book remains more accessible, and Brignull also makes his research widely available on the Deceptive Patterns website.
Your first step to becoming a deceptive pattern survivor - as opposed to a victim - can start with his work.
For further reading:
Brignull, Harry, et al. “Deceptive Patterns – User Interfaces Designed to Trick You.” deceptive.design, 20 Apr. 2024, deceptive.design.
‘Deceptive Patterns: Exposing the tricks tech companies use to control you’
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