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Written by Harry Brignull

Archive for the ‘Bad Design’ Topic

Dark Patterns: dirty tricks designers use to make people do stuff

July 8th, 2010 by 119 comments


Image credit: Paul McDonald

Normally we think of bad design as consisting of laziness, mistakes, or school-boy errors. We refer to these sorts of design patterns as Antipatterns. However, there’s another kind of bad design pattern, one that’s been crafted with great attention to detail, and a solid understanding of human psychology, to trick users into do things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. This is the dark side of design, and since these kind of design patterns don’t have a name, I’m proposing we start calling them Dark Patterns.

I’m preparing a short talk on this for the UX Brighton Conference in September, and I need a bit of help coming up with some examples. Here’s a taste of what I’m talking about:

Can you think of any good, contemporary examples to go with this list? Add your suggestions in the comments below. I will, of course, credit you in my slides.

To be clear, I’m not looking for outright scams (which are clumsy and easy to identify), I’m looking for techniques used by above-board products and services that trick users into doing things.

Amazon’s third party merchants, and the problem with erosion of trust

June 7th, 2010 by 7 comments

The problem with running an online marketplace is that it’s hard to police all your sellers. If too many of them provide low quality product descriptions, poorly curated metadata and pixelated photos, then your own brand will suffer.

eBay has always been very careful about presenting the eBay platform and its resellers as different entities. Amazon, on the other hand, really doesn’t seem to have nailed it. If I have a bad purchasing experience on eBay, I blame the seller. When it happens on Amazon, I can’t help but loose trust in Amazon itself.

The video below sums it up for me. When you hit play, you’ll see me mousing-over the different product options for a perfume. You’ll see jargony acronyms (EDT / EDP), inexplicable price differences, different measurements (fl oz vs ml), unclear photos, and missing product descriptions. Bleugh.

It is, of course, down to the seller, but the seller’s name is only mentioned only in two places as body text – effectively hidden away. It feels like Amazon itself as at fault.




Can’t make out the video? View the page on Amazon.co.uk

So – what would you do if you were Amazon? Would you carefully design your UI to clearly differentiate your brand from the third party merchant brands? Would you simply bite the bullet and start policing them harder? Or would you try to crowd-source it, and give means for the community to report poor content?