Dark UI patterns on the verizonfios website | Hacker News Reader

Dark UI patterns on the verizonfios website

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121 pointsseoguru21 comments

Whoa. Getting pretty well shared around the web.

I want to be clear that it seems there is an attempt at accurate data: https://twitter.com/rikschennink/status/736618354098737152?s... but the implementation is a completely failure.

"Dark UI patterns" seems a little over the top to me, I think it might be attributable to Hanlon's Razor. Probably some lazy programmer at Verizon stubbed in some code then forgot about it or moved on and no one remembered to go back and put in the actual code to find the actual wait time, or they couldn't figure out how to do it so just put bs in.

This guy's conjecture comes somewhat close to an explanation: https://twitter.com/rikschennink/status/736618354098737152.

But even so, why bother putting any number at all unless the user is there for long enough to care? No information is better than false information.

I would say that's a little generous. I've also worked at companies of similar size to this where it isn't uncommon for managers to just ask programmers to randomly generate a number so they can lie and claim they've implemented some functionality.

Yeah, usually with Dark UI Patterns I associate a bit more hostility to users=like tricking someone into buying or downloading something. This seems more like someone had a good idea, but found out it was too hard to implement so fudged it.

This is tricking you into staying on the page, pursuing a route that may or may not be in your best interest.

Lying to your customers to make yourself look better is malice. "Lazy programmer" excuse is just as shitty as "rogue engineer". Who is in charge of QA and feature testing? "That sounds hard to implement correctly, let's lie instead."

Saw that. Makes you wonder about other BS we see or hear when we call for support. "Our agents are busy with other customers. You are in #5 with a 25 min wait" hoping you'll hang up and drop the support request.

That I would trust in so far as you're in wait. Management probably wants your call answered. The technician's the one hoping you drop.

Management wants you to wait and give them a chance to solve your problem before you e.g. cancel. This kind of thing tricks you into waiting longer than you otherwise would, it doesn't trick you into going away.

Abandon rate is generally a /negative/ metric in reporting. They tell you how long it will be, because that actually make you more likely to stay the full time.

I won't take their part in this but, having owned a software company since 2009 already, I know there are certain "lazy" individuals who prefer to submit such code just to close those issues faster. I know we are supposed to check the code commits more carefully but code like this one sometimes gets into production...It could also be a mock that made it into production.

I don't see how this is necessarily a dark pattern.

It's an anti-pattern, not a dark pattern.

The code fetches some sort of number serverside, and then randomly updates it.

It's pointless anyways, my guess is the marketing company that made that page has no actual integration with the IVR system.

Except there's more on that page: https://twitter.com/vcsjones/status/736715020793417729

  Their "detecting problems" progress bar is a timer...

You assume too much malice from people, and too little problems with enterprise integrations.

My guess is that the spec said to use the real number, and when the team couldn't deliver that, after six failed months of repeated attempts to integrate, they had to put something in because it was too late to change the ui wireframe that had already been signed off by executives.

In my personal experience 99% of everything today is fake.

...including statistics?

Everything. I was and still occasionally work in media and you wouldn't believe what is going on. The whole world is fake. It makes me sick. From people pretending to fake stories to fake statistics, yes.

Don't get me wrong. It was always this way. Maybe today it's a little better than in other periods in history but we still didn't evolve much. We're all talk mostly.

I'm pretty sure the ground I'm walking on is real.

But then again, you can never tell...

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