#evil design

UX Design as we understand is a science to make technology easy, better and to improve relationship with brands, by understanding users' psychology. Just like a trusted friend, UX Design undoubtedly is like a protagonist who is virtuous and is always user-centric. Like they say, every protagonist is incomplete without a antagonist, in this case its the the evil twin of UX- The evil UXD.   In this blog, let's have a look at the antagonist of UX, where UX design is drawn towards the darker side to use the very virtuous UX heuristics for evil intents and manipulation.

What is Evil UXD? The prime objective of Evil UXD is to make the users spend time, clicks or money in one way or other by manipulative tricks and guile; all to the brand’s advantage directly or indirectly. These patterns in interfaces are deliberately designed to trick users into doing an action or restrain from a certain action, for the advantage of the brand. It could be a simple logout button which is unnecessarily hidden in menus, or it could even be a simple expendable product sneaking in your shopping cart without your knowledge. As many deceiving ways it may come in, the Evil UXD is not user-centric, but brand's profit-centric.

The Craft of Evil UXD But being pure evil is easy, but it can be sensed by the users easily too; And for taking advantage of the users' weaknesses, it is the brand that is eventually hated and abandoned. In many deliberate efforts to be evil by brands for playing nasty tricks on users, (thanks to bodies like the European Union) the websites can get lawfully banned and penalized. The real craft of Evil UXD lies in making these traps look like genuine UX flaws, and not get penalised or hated.

The gray area in the picture above is what we will be discussing today. It needs technique to manipulate the users right under their noses, and elegantly able to get away with. When these tricks get unnoticed or seen as too small to complain; In either case, the brand reaps the advantage.

Seven sins of Evil UXD

To understand any evil it is important to understand the rationale or need behind it. All the tricks and deeds ultimately connect to these seven sins below, which eventually translates to brand's advantage in one way or the other...

1. To make user spend more time on a site/to click/to visit 2. To increase/save users against their choice to quit 3. Marketing through spams, subscriptions and user base 4. By selling the products to the users by guile 5. To get constant connection to user by their software/app installation, and even to spy on your personal information 6. To avoid/save on support 7. To increase dependency on their product and beat competition

Dark patterns- The Acts of Evil UXD

The acts are the tricks which lead to Evil UXD sins. These tricky elements in the interface are called the dark patterns.These patterns are what we encounter everyday, but do not realise that these are taking advantage of every second and thought we spend in them, in ways we can't even imagine. www.darkpatterns.com have organised and grouped these patterns thoughtfully which are listed below.. 

1. Bait and Switch

The user sets out to do one thing, but a different, undesirable thing happens instead. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and it is very broad in nature – many dark patterns involve some kind of bait & switch. Click here to know more.

2. Disguised Ads

Adverts that are disguised as other kinds of content or navigation, in order to get users to click on them. Click here to know more.

3. Faraway Bill Utility companies traditionally sent out monthly bills by snail mail, but today they tend to put them online – leading to bills that are rarely seen and easily forgotten. How you receive your bills is framed by companies as a choice between “offline” and “online”, but is in fact also a decision of “push” versus “pull”. With snail mail bills, you received a detailed breakdown each month. With online bills, few companies will email you the detailed breakdown, citing security concerns. Instead, you have to remember to log in, then go through the tedious process of navigating to your most recent bill. As a result, a certain proportion of people just don’t bother – and as a result they forget about the costs of the service, and aren’t able to react unexpected additions to the bill. Click here to know more.

4. Forced Continuity The user signs up for a free trial on a website, and in doing so they are required to enter their credit card details. When the trial comes to an end, they automatically start getting billed for the paid service. The user is not given an adequate reminder, nor are they given an easy and rapid way of cancelling the automatic renewal. Sometimes this is combined with the Sneak into Basket dark pattern (as alleged in the Vistaprint class action lawsuit.). This dark pattern was previously known as “Silent Credit Card Roll-over” but was renamed since the term “forced continuity” is already popularly used in Marketing. Click here to know more.

5. Forced Disclosure In return for a free or low-cost action, the site requires the user to disclose extensive personal information – unnecessary to the transaction in-hand. Click here to know more.

6. Friend Spam A site or game asks for your Twitter or email credentials (either via the password antipattern or via OAuth for an allegedly benign purpose e.g. finding friends who are already using that service), but then goes on to publish content or send out bulk messages using your account – i.e. from you. This technique is commonly used by viruses – but even well-known companies sometimes engage in “friend spam”. Click here to know more.

7.Hidden Costs A hidden cost occurs when a user gets to the last step of the checkout process, only to discover some unexpected charges have appeared, e.g. delivery charges, tax, etc. Click here to know more.

8. Misdirection The attention of the user is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another. Click here to know more.

9.Price Comparison Prevention The attention of the user is focused on one thing in order to distract its attention from another. Click here to know more.

10. Privacy Zuckering “The act of creating deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces which trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to.” (As defined by the EFF). The term “Zuckering” was suggested in an EFF article by Tim Jones on Facebook’s “Evil Interfaces”. It is, of course, named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Click here to know more.

11. Roach Motel The “Roach Motel” is a broad category of Dark Pattern that subsumes most types listed on this site. Put simply, a Roach Motel makes it very easy for a user to get into a certain situation, but then makes it hard for them to get out of it when they realize it is undesirable. Email newsletter unsubscription is a well known example – whereby it is typically easy to subscribe, but much more effort is needed to unsubscribe. The revised CAN-SPAM 2008 rules state that this practice is forbidden for emails that have a primary purpose “to advertise or promote a commercial product or service”. (Unfortunately, CAN-SPAM does not cover “transactional or relationship” messages.) Click here to know more.

12. Road Block When the user’s progress to task completion is restricted or stopped by something else on the screen.Click here to know more.

13. Sneak into Basket The user attempts to purchase a specific item. However, somewhere in the purchasing journey the site sneaks an additional item into their basket, often through the use of an opt-out radio button or checkbox on a prior page. Click here to know more.

14. Trick Questions The user is required to respond to a question (typically in the checkout process), which, when glanced upon quickly appears to ask one thing, but if read carefully, asks another thing entirely. This pattern works because it is normal for users to employ high-speed scan-reading on the web – see Steve Krug: ”We don’t read pages. We scan them.“) Click here to know more.

My attempt at being Evil

I have also tried out a dark pattern in a recent project at Decos. We designed an app to collect response whether the trash has been picked everyday, from citizens of Nagpur.  Its a simple one page interface designed such that the user need not have to open the app everyday. The app simply pop ups the question “Is your garbage picked today?” in the notifications every day before noon. As simple as that....

It was made clear that the stakeholders are expecting an app-response above 70% from the users everyday. I sensed that there is a high chance of the app notification getting ignored, because of more important things in the citizen’s life other than trash. So I tried tweaking the design with a dark pattern to have automated responses, in the cases where the users do not bother to respond to our notification. I tried to play in the grey area to let the user know the countdown for the automatic response, and presented to the marketing and management team.

The team shot the idea down, because it was too risky to jeopardise our company’s credibility and reputation that Decos have. I say, thats a good judicious call... But for me, I got the kicks out of being evil for a while.

With great (UXD) power comes great responsibility. If UXD is like a superpower, its up to the designer to choose what he uses them for. As a UX designer who is a Deadpool fan, I adore the smart craft of Evil UXD and find designing it challenging and exciting. I personally feel that it is ok to use the super-powers to my advantage once a while. But, things get different when you are designing for an organisation. Your risks become the organisation’s and vice-versa. But always remember, evil could never conquer anything concrete. Bob Marley once said "You can fool some people some time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time", so be judicious.

So the next time you do not get to figure out your way in an interface, get stuck or get irritated finding something... Watch out! you might be a target for Evil UXD.

Let me know what you think...

This book by Chris Nodder, as the title already suggests, is concerned with the seven deadly sins pride, sloth, gluttony, anger, envy, lust, and greed. But what do these human traits have to do with design? First of all, it is about understanding human behaviour and comprehending that human frailty can provide a learning experience. As Nodder argues, designers work very hard to control behaviours and emotions, so design is all about persuasion. Only relatively late, did psychologists and researchers find out why people behave and react a certain way. So, design is also often used to make money out of our weaknesses even if the intentions might be good. Most of the time, we do not even realise that we are manipulated. 

Nodder defines evil design as something that “creates purposefully designed interfaces that make users emotionally involved in doing something that benefits the designer more than them” (xv). Therefore, he groups design techniques and the seven sins together since they both relate to human traits:

Pride:

“These days, the sense in which pride is bad is probably best summed up by the word hubris - arrogance, loss of touch with reality, overestimating one’s capabilities, thinking that you can do no wrong (...) It’s all about how the brain manages to rationalize or resolve two conflicting concepts: a state called cognitive dissonance” (1-2). -> changing opinions is much easier than changing  behaviours!

Provide many reasons for people to use your product!

Social proof: make it/messages personal and emotional (by including friends)!

Eliminate doubt by repeating positive messages!

Change opinions by emphasising general similarities!

Use images of certification and endorsement!

Help people complete tasks, sets, and collections!

Depend on people’s desire for oder: make them clean up!

Sloth: 

“(...) describes laziness, but laziness is the outcome rather than the source of sloth. Sloth is actually avoidance of work or a “don’t care” feeling. (...) Thinking of sloth as avoiding work or not caring about outcomes gives us a useful perspective; namely that people are not motivated to do more than the absolute minimum work to achieve their online aims. You could call this “lazy,” but that isn’t necessarily true. Instead, customers demand easy-to-use sites and software. We have been trained to look for cues that help us move forward in our tasks with the minimum of effort, and we’ll often abandon sites that make us work too hard (39)”.

Desire lines: From A to B with as few barriers as possible! 

Create a path of least resistance and make sure that your end goal is the easiest way through the process!

Reduce options and include smart defaults to smoothen the decision process!

Emphasise your first choice and make people accept this as theirs too!

Make options hard to find or understand!

Negative options: sign people up by default and make it hard for them to alter their decisions by hiding the desire lines in plain sight!

Gluttony: 

“(...) occurs when we over-consume to the point of extravagance or waste. (...) Companies encourage this overabundance by making us feel like we deserve to be rewarded and by escalating our level of commitment beyond what we first intended, drawing us in from early engagement through to full-on compliance. Sites also make us fearful of missing out—scarcity, exclusivity, and loss aversion play on the fears behind gluttony (67)”. 

Make customers work for (exclusive) rewards!

Hide the math (show answers rather than the workings)!

Show the problems (mention weaknesses before the user finds out) = build trust!

Foot-in-the-door: gain commitment to a small thing to convince about a big thing!

Door-in-the-face: first ask for a big thing and after being turned down ask for a smaller thing (the user is more likely to agree now since he/she is guilty of turning you down)!

Present hard decisions only after you are sure that the user is invested!

The Tom Sawyer effect: scarcity breeds desire!

Anger: 

(...) is fear with a focus: an understanding of what caused the fear and often also the capacity to resolve the fear by acting to remove it. It’s an active emotion; people want to deal with the cause of their anger in ways they don’t with other emotions. This happens on an intellectual and also a physical level, with biological changes as a result of feeling anger. (...) Anger has different effects on judgment and decision making than do other negative emotions. Anger influences how we perceive, reason, and choose. Its effects spill over from the initial cause to other things we’re doing, affecting how we respond to situations that have no bearing on the thing that initially made us angry (103)”.

Use humour to deflect anger and defuse the situation!

Use metaphysical arguments to beat opponents (have something that science can’t explain)!

Use anonymity to encourage repressed behaviours!

Give people permission and remove individual responsibility!

Scare people and remove that fear by presenting your product as the solution!

Envy: 

“(...) as a race we humans seem to be almost hard-wired to react to other people’s success with envy. (...)  In other words, we hate feeling like we’ve lost out. That feeling of deprivation, inferiority, or shame is the basis of destructive envy. With destructive envy, it’s not just that we want the thing that someone else has; we also want that other person to not have it because their having it makes us feel inferior. In these situations, we make decisions based not just on benefit to ourselves, but also to make gains over others around us. So, even if we found ourselves in a situation in which we could gain more by cooperating with someone, destructive envy dictates that we’d often rather not work together than be in a position in which that other person benefitted more than we did. Whether the root of someone’s envy is benign or destructive, it’s a powerful motivating force. That means it can be harnessed to make customers do things (137-138)”.

Create desirability for your object to produce envy as a motivating force!

Create something aspirational and produce benign envy!

Make people feel ownership before they’ve bought! 

Create status differences to drive behaviour (otherwise there is no envy)!

Emphasise achievement as a form of status and train them to keep coming back for more!

Let users advertise their status within a community!

Make people feel important and give them recognition to earn their trust/love!

Lust:

“We might often think of lust as sexual, but it actually describes an intense desire for any item. When we lust after something we stop thinking rationally. We look only for additional reasons to have it, not for reasons to abstain. So, when people have that craving, it doesn’t take much of a nudge to turn desire into action by convincing them to fulfill those lustful feelings. (...) Lust is the starting point; envy and greed are the results. To harness lust, companies must first get people to like them so that they are inclined to do what the company wants (169)”.

Flattery makes people more responsive to persuasion!

Frame your message as a question and give the user a sense of being addressed directly and individually!

Create an in-group and show your customers that they belong there!

Give something to get something and people will feel obligated to give back!

Make something free and eliminate rationality this way!

Sell the intangible value and change the perception rather than the reality!

Greed:

“(...) is the desire to get or keep more stuff than you need, either accumulating money or possessions (“whoever has the most toys wins”) or just to feel better than someone else does. (...) All talk of sin aside, there does seem to be a correlation between having more than one needs and being selfish. When talking about haves and have-nots, there are four possible behaviors: selfishness, altruism, spite, and cooperation. Greed happens when people pursue their own agenda at the expense of others, leading to selfish or spiteful behaviour (203)”.

Customers should win instead of finish/buy something (description matters)!

Further blow up people’s self-esteem and feeling of skills and mastery by giving them quick wins and train them to continue!

Make rewards look like they were earned by someone’s skills rather than luck!

Make sure that people have little reason to leave your site by walling them in!

Own the anchor point and control the terms of your offering!

Move from money to tokens with an arbitrary value!

Increase the price and people will appreciate your product more! 

Aside from the smart idea to connect the seven deadly sins to design, this book provides a nice collection of tips to persuade people to something you want. This can be helpful when you try to make a profit. Nevertheless, I would be careful with some of these principles as the online user has already learned what not to trust and quickly realises when he is being manipulated. At that point it is already too late since he will have lost trust in you and maybe even avoid your product. Although most of the ideas are rather subtle and might really work, I am somehow repelled by his main message that design is all about manipulating, influencing, and exploiting human behaviour. But maybe I am too idealistic about the field, who knows. However, aside from my mixed feelings, the book is well-written, presents nice examples, and is definitely worth reading. You will find a new perspective on design tools and what to choose for your work.

Buy the book here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118422147/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1118422147&linkCode=as2&tag=grumpyoldgit-20

Have Fun!

Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People by Harry Brignull, UX Consultant

Visit the Dark Patterns website.