Dark Design Patterns Catalog - Jakob Nielsen on UX

Summary: New regulations from the Government of India prohibit the use of 12 common dark design patterns. These sneaky practices are unethical applications of established UX knowledge to make interface designs that harm users instead of helping them.

“Dark design patterns” are ways of cheating users through a variety of misleading user interfaces — or sometimes simply by making it unnecessarily difficult to accomplish actions that the user wants but that the company wants to prevent, such as canceling a subscription. Simply evil!

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently filed suit against Amazon.com, alleging that it stepped over the line, intending to dupe customers into subscriptions they never sought and then preventing them from escaping the traps they had unwittingly entered. This case is not resolved, so we don’t know if Amazon’s dark patterns are actually illegal. In my review of the case, I deemed some of Amazon’s dark design patterns to be sufficiently egregious to be worth 4 of 5 skulls, whereas others only earned 2 of 5 skulls.

Evil design has been with us since the beginning of the web. The Government of India is now talking steps to fight dark design. (Dall-E)

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