Web designers manipulate us psychologically thanks to different tools so that we click in a certain place or longer than we would have thought at first.
Dark patterns (user interfaces designed to manipulate shrewdly people to do things) have become common enough on websites and mobile apps, there are nearly two dozen vendors who provide persuasion behavioral as a service.
And in some cases, these companies openly advertise deceptive marketing techniques, outlining ways to generate fake product orders and social messages praising those fraudulent orders.
This finding is just one of those made by seven Computer Science experts (Arunesh Mathur, Gunes Acar, Michael Friedman, Elena Lucherini, Jonathan Mayer, Marshini Chetty and Arvind Narayanan), all from Princeton University (United States), except Chetty of the University of Chicago.
The experts published a draft of the research paper, Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K shopping sites , which explores the prevalence of web-based influencing techniques.
“We examined the underlying influence of these dark patterns, documenting their potential harm to users’ decision making. We also examined these patterns of deceptive practices, and found 183 websites that engage in such practices. Ultimately, we discovered 22 external entities that offer dark patterns as a turnkey solution. Based on our findings, we make recommendations to stakeholders, including researchers and regulators, to study, mitigate and minimize the use of these patterns, “said Arvind Narayanan, Professor at Princeton.
Researchers analyzed 11,000 world-class shopping websites , as ranked by Amazon’s Alexa service, using a custom tracker that visits e-commerce sites and completes the click stream to purchase products and then saves found interfaces and interactions. for analysis.
The tracker found 1,841 dark patterns of 15 different types, in 1,267 of the 11,000 shopping sites, which represents about 11.2% of the total . Experts have divided these ‘tricks’ into seven categories.
The 7 main tricks
Sneaky: They try to misrepresent the actions of the user, or delay information that, if visible to the user, he would probably desist from the purchase.
Urgency: They impose a deadline on a sale or transaction, thus speeding up decision-making and user purchases.
Disorientation: The use of images, language, or emotions to induce or discourage a particular decision.
Social proof: Influence user behavior by describing the experiences and behavior of other users.
Scarcity: Similar to the first of the dark patterns, they indicate that a product is likely to be unavailable, thus increasing its attractiveness to users and their purchasing power.
Obstruction: They make it easy for the user to get into a situation but difficult to escape from it.
Forced action: They force the user to an unforeseen action in order to complete their task (such as subscribing to the newsletter ).
Is it legal?
Dark patterns, ethical as they may be, are not necessarily illegal. “Not all dark patterns are illegal, but they are still problematic because they are meant to take advantage of our cognitive limitations and weaknesses,” added Professor Narayanan.
But some do break the law. According to the researchers, stealth or surreptitious dark patterns are made illegal in the Consumer Rights Directive. They also point out that the 234 cases of deception they found on 183 websites are illegal in the US, the European Union, and other jurisdictions.
Lawmakers have already taken note. In April, Senators Mark R. Warner and Deb Fischer of the United States proposed the Reduced Deceptive Experiences for Online Users Act (DETOUR) , which aims to prevent large service providers (more than 100 million monthly users) use deceptive interface designs for software applications.
The researchers say they hope their technology for identifying dark patterns will be helpful. “The tracking and clustering methodology we developed can be easily generalized and radically reduces the difficulty of discovering and measuring dark patterns at the web scale,” the researchers explained in their paper.
They also hope their work will inspire countermeasures like creating a website that names and shames e-commerce companies that base their activities on dark patterns.
