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Original URL: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/07/dark-patterns-are-designed-to-trick-you-and-theyre-all-over-the-web/
Everyone has been there. So in 2010, London-based UX designer Harry Brignull decided he’d document it. Brignull’s website, darkpatterns.org, offers plenty of examples of deliberately confusing or deceptive user interfaces. These dark patterns trick unsuspecting users into a gamut of actions: setting up recurring payments, purchasing items surreptitiously added to a shopping cart, or spamming all contacts through prechecked forms on Facebook games.
Dark patterns aren’t limited to the Web, either. The Columbia House mail-order music club of the '80s and '90s famously charged users exorbitant rates for music they didn’t choose if they forgot to specify what they wanted. In fact, negative-option billing began as early as 1927, when a book club decided to bill members in advance and ship a book to anyone who didn’t specifically decline. Another common offline example? Some credit card statements boast a 0 percent balance transfer but don’t make it clear that the percentage will shoot up to a ridiculously high number unless a reader navigates a long agreement in tiny print.
“The way that companies implement the deceptive practices has gotten more sophisticated over time,” said UX designer Jeremy Rosenberg, a contributor to the Dark Patterns site. “Today, things are more likely to be presented as a benefit or obscured as a benefit even if they’re not.”
When you combine the interactive nature of the Web, increasingly savvy businesses, and the sheer amount of time users spend online, it’s a recipe for dark pattern disaster. And after gaining an awareness for this kind of deception, you’ll recognize it’s nearly ubiquitous.
With six years of data, Brignull has broken dark patterns down into 14 categories. There are hidden costs users don’t see until the end. There’s misdirection, where sites attract user attention to a specific section to distract them from another. Other categories include sites that prevent price comparison or have tricky or misleading opt-in questions. One type, Privacy Zuckering, refers to confusing interfaces tricking users into sharing more information than they want to. (It’s named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, of course.) Though perhaps the worst class of dark pattern is forced continuity, the common practice of collecting credit card details for a free trial and then automatically billing users for a paid service without an adequate reminder.
But while hackers and even SEO firms are often distinguished as “white hat” or “black hat,” intent isn’t always as clear when it comes to dark patterns. Laura Klein, Principal at Users Know and author of UX for Lean Startups, is quick to point out that sometimes it’s just a really, really poor design choice. “To me, dark patterns are very effective in their goal, which is to trick the user into doing something that they would not otherwise do,” she said. Shady patterns, on the other hand, simply push the company’s agenda over the user’s desires without being explicitly deceptive.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Sunday July 31 2016, @01:33PM
Go to mozilla.org
scroll to the bottom of the page.
Click the "Need Help" spanner icon. A page loads with seven Mozilla products on it, including Thunderbird.
Click on "Thunderbird". A page with 9 help topics and a big green "Download" button loads.
Click on Download. A selection screen loads.
Select your version and click it.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Monday August 01 2016, @02:01PM
QED.
So, by (their) definition, if I want actual information, I need help?
The explanatory text says (hmmm... I have to type it by hand, as it is actually an image for no good reason) "Get answers to your questions about Firefox and all Mozilla products from our support team". I'd never have thought to follow that link, as I don't have a question about any of their products and I don't want to talk to their support team. I just want to visit the $%^$@^@ thunderbird page, so that I can download a fresh copy and/or see the release notes.
And why, pray, is the destination of that link, which is a list of all their products, with a short description of each and links to the appropriate pages, not the main mozilla page?
BTW, the "need help" page will send you to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/thunderbird [mozilla.org] , which is on the mozilla support site. Google points to the page on the main site, which is https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ [mozilla.org] and is different. I still don't know of a way to get there from the main page, other than using a search engine or appending "thunderbird" to the URL of the main page.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday August 02 2016, @02:42AM
I agree that the list of products should be the main page, and that their website is crap.
But technically, requiring information is requiring "help". The reason I followed it was because I thought there might be a help topic about getting to the download links. :)
Regarding your BTW, I'm not sure if it's different for me in Oz, but following the big green Download button I mentioned above takes you to the page you say you can't get to: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ [mozilla.org]
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:18AM
So it does. Heaven forfend that the "download" button would actually point to the download page!
So, to summarize, to get to the main thunderbird page from the main mozilla page, you need to follow the "need help" link, select thunderbird, then follow the "download" link. Obvious squared!