Deceptive Patterns

FINALLY!

It took forever but I finally found time to read. In my new cozy living room, sitting in my comfortable chair with my feet propped up on my nice ottoman. I love IKEA.

This report probably reads a lot more negative than my actual feelings towards it. To preface the negativity, I wrote about what I got out of the text.

Deceptive Patterns, by Dr. Harry Brignull. is about the various tricks employed by tech companies to make consumers act in ways that are favorable to big tech by employing UI tricks. The writing style is similar to one of my blog posts which I found off putting but it makes sense since Harry runs deceptive.design, a website formally known as darkpatterns.org, that is dedicated to defining and exposing dark/deceptive patterns.

Harry coined the term dark pattern in 2010 but has since changed it to deceptive pattern although the majority of people continue to use the original term. I doubt I’ll update my terminology unless the new term becomes widespread.

A large portion of the text that talks about dark patterns are case studies of dark patterns being used in the real world or studies conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of dark patterns.

To be honest, I wasn’t a huge fan of this book. I agreed with most of what the author had to say but I didn’t like the writing. It started off strong with the example at London Gatwick Airport then quickly faded. There was a paragraph that described the way human eyeballs worked and it seemed unnecessary. Most chapters were less than 10 pages and didn’t go into great detail about most subjects presented. This could be because the book would become redundant very quickly, which it eventually did.

I went from learning useful terminology like sludge and affirmative tunneling to hearing the same definition of dark pattern being quoted in a law that varies slightly from the law that was just presented a page ago.

Harry Brignull is obviously an intelligent person and is maybe the most authoritative person in this field. When he started talking about the process of reviewing applications when he was called as an expert witness, I was excited to learn what he did. Then he chose not to go into any meaningful detail about the process.

When it comes to what was stated, I only have two significant disagreements on Harry’s analysis of the state of dark patterns. The first is that things are getting progressively better, and that upcoming regulation will fix a great deal of problems. Big tech has been cheating this space for a long time and it will continue to do so. Even when there is regulation, it’s hard to enforce it. Henry pointed out multiple Shopify apps that disobeyed Shopify’s rules.

The second disagreement is that Harry didn’t mention education to users as a method of overcoming dark patterns. Twitter may have a few victories, but it should be acknowledged that a perfect solution is likely impossible and dark patterns will forever be a feature of digital technology. Making users aware of the practices and their purpose will give them some control. You can argue that every street should be safe to walk down at night but that isn’t true. It should be, but it isn’t. Awareness gives people the chance to protect themselves.

The end of the book was a call to action to use his website to report dark patterns. I wouldn’t recommend buying the book if you’re familiar with the subject matter. There is an audience for it, I’m just not it.

I don’t understand why this book wasn’t a series of blog posts. Looking at his website, maybe it is.