Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
theverge.com
theverge.com
It's a gas station in Poland. This attempts to trick you into buying the overpriced 98 octane gasoline instead of the default 95 that everyone buys.
Notice that the 95 is hidden in the middle of the diesel fuel dispensers and even its nozzle is designed to match those. The photo doesn't show it well but the actual labels are placed high enough so that you won't spot them unless you deliberately look up.
Your job as an entrepreneur should be to steer your users toward options that are optimal for him/her and charge accordingly. Trying to trick your user into choosing something worse for him so that you can profit more is just dickish, period.
> almost every form of marketing could be considered an evil pattern by that definition as well
Because it often is, and it's bewildering how people are used to it - to the point they turned cheating and abuse into a legitimate occupation.
Who is this "we" you talk about? Any time I hear "growth hacking", I reinterpret to "whitewashed term for scummy SEO and/or spam."
Its mandatory field is a list like this :
"Which is your country of origin ?
Austria
Belgium
Croatia
Denmark
France
I don't want insurance
Italy
Sweden
Ungary"
Priceless.
http://i.imgur.com/99pIygi.png
It appears that they don't use this dark pattern on German speakers.
Dark patterns like this are now illegal by European Law. [1]
[1] http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/08/26/some-dark-pa...
Btw. In most of apps user interfaces and usability is just so bad, that you don't need any dark patterns to completely ruin experience and frustrate users. Making something purely random and without any logic, isn't 'carefully crated', but it does exactly the same.
As long as the form is clear about what the tick means and an opt-out set up increases positive behavior that benefits fellow man and society, is it really such a clear-cut bad thing? Is the pattern evil, or the outcomes?
Also if you're interested in the opt-in/opt-out debate, here's an interesting discussion of some of its nuances:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/biome/opt-in-or-opt-out-informi...
I think issue is quite simple - if you're exploiting people for your own gain, it's dickish. A lot of the discussion, and generally sales, marketing and PR, is just people trying to excuse doing things they know are wrong, so that they don't feel bad about themselves.
What a surprise to see the "?share=1" people in an article on dark patterns. I don't understand how that site exists.
The article was written in August 2013, and used information from early that year. For one thing, Experts Exchange has used neither that system since before the article came out (meaning it's bad research to begin with).
But if you all want to drink the Kool-Aid, be my guests.
How does that work?
It was the first source I know of that started a compilation of these.