Harry’s passion for deceptive patterns started off in 2010. The movement he was part of grew and developed laws which are important to understand.
Visual perception in humans and animals can be tricked and taken advantage of quite easily – to deceive people which can in turn become profitable for many companies and businesses.
- consent washing
- text being hard for people to see
- like ‘terms’ link as users can’t sue into it for any reason if they consented by accident as they didn’t notice
- losing a legal right – takes a choice away from them
- exploitive strategies
- to do with mindset and psychology that leads a business to do this
- businesses see people as a commodity to be exploited
- law – loop holes and grey areas exploited for profit
When you manipulate people it involves exploiting vulnerabilities in human psychology – more than just cognitive bias. A designer knows what users expect and users trust designers to act in their best interests.
Cognitive bias is one of the most famous and exploited biases – where people choose the default option. An example of this is a pre-ticked checkbox, which can tie a user into something they’re not aware of. Cookie rejection rates are much lower, and manipulative due to the big ‘accept all’ button – 1.4% people rejected cookies. However a study showed that with ‘configure cookies’ 6.5% rejected cookies. Users feel like they have the option to reject cookies when there’s a visible option. Although when there is a clear ‘reject cookies’ button (67.2 %) rejected cookies which as a result has a much bigger impact – all down to the design and user behaviour. I found this study to be really interesting as it showed the impact designers have with the design choices on users.
The combined effect of deceptive patterns eg:
- mental fatigue
- trick wording and visual interferance
- deceptive countdown timer
- easy to sign up but hard to cancel
- combining deceptive patterns can be risky and lead to legal outcomes and consequences
Deceptive patterns are very widespread and prevalent and can cause harm to individuals, groups and in the marketplace
- financial, time and privacy loss
- can affect people in poverty, low education, contextually vulnerable, disabilities…
- hard to cancel subscriptions
Deceptive patterns in the marketplace prevent people from being informed by facts and acting freely. This can result in people being locked in with companies. However companies and businesses have to prioritise themselves – regulation and reinforcement is important for them as a result of factors like competition in the industry. As a result many new laws were set in place by the EU which keeps deceptive patterns regulated.
Overall I found this lecture given by Harry Brignull to be very eye opening, as it gave me an insight into the industry – what to be aware of when it comes to designing for customers and users. He emphasised the trust a user has with what a designer has created and the difference it can make when deceptive patterns are involved in the equation.