How Dark Patterns can improve your conversion rates but damage your brand.

http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/12/17/dark-patterns-an-overview-for-brand-owners/

by harrybr • 16 years ago

46 23 16 years ago

That was a very good presentation, reminds me to continue to work more towards allowing user interaction without requiring registration.

lwhi• 16 years ago

TL:DR - Don't trick your users.

swombat3• 16 years ago

Good point, though I would argue (and have argued here: http://swombat.com/2010/12/19/dark-patterns-good-for-busines...) that in some business sectors, like, for example, the ultra-competitive registrar market, dark patterns are a necessity. If you don't use them you will go bankrupt. So before you discard dark patterns, make sure you're in a business that can afford to do so.

Also, things that were considered dark patterns in other types of businesses (e.g. supermarkets), like laying out the shop in a way that will encourage you to buy more stuff, are now considered standard business practice. Will that happen to these patterns too?

JoachimSchipper2• 16 years ago

I'd argue that if you can't make money without tricking people, you shouldn't be in that particular branch of business.

swombat3• 16 years ago

You can argue that all you want, but Ryanair, which epitomises the application of dark patterns in every aspect of its operations, is the largest or second-largest carrier in the world on a number of metrics (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair).

If you want to tell them they shouldn't be in the airline business, sure, but I'm not quite sure what your argument is then.

naz• 16 years ago

People were saying that about Yahoo, you can't make money without pop-ups, etc. before Google came along

swombat3• 16 years ago

Google didn't win because of their lack of popups, they won because of their massively superior search engine and revolutionary advertising business model.

What's your revolutionary improvement in the domain name registrar market?

pygy_• 16 years ago

For an honest, reliable and competitive registrar, have a look at Gandi: http://en.gandi.net/

hugh32• 16 years ago

Uh, can anyone explain what Dark Patterns are?

It's not explained on the page, and while it may be explained if you want to sit through the slideshow I'd rather know what it's about before I start listening to some Englishman drone on about it.

harrybr• 16 years ago

Haha, fair point! I'm the droning Englishman giving the presentation. If you'd rather read than listen, check out the http://darkpatterns.org - it's a public wiki that I curate. Here's the definition of Dark Patterns from the site:

"Dark Patterns are User Interfaces that are designed to trick people. Normally when you think of bad design', you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind."

hugh32• 16 years ago

Ah, thanks for the explanation.

(And I apologise for the "droning" remark, I actually only listened to the first half sentence of what you had to say -- I wasn't expecting to hear a voice when I clicked on the "next slide" button -- so I'm not qualified to judge your speaking voice...)

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

Hey Harry-

Just a quick note for your wiki, since I don't want to make Yet Another Account... on the Misdirection page: http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Misdirection

You mention ExpertsExchange has now hidden their information, and give this page as an example: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Applications/MS_Office/Excel...

But check this out: plug the URL into Google: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&...

Click "cached": http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WHOsXsX...

And then scroooooooooll again like before. There's the answers!

They don't want to lose the Google juice, so they change the contents of the page so that Google sees it all, and regular people don't. You can also change your UA string to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) and it works...

amorphid• 16 years ago

Use of dark patterns is lazy and unsustainable.

gojomo• 16 years ago

I love the way Google Autocomplete serves as a window into the raw sentiments of the masses.

How Dark Patterns can improve your conversion rates but damage your brand.

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