90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Have you ever wondered why there are many clearly defined Design Patterns for good design, and Anti-Patterns for mistakes, but in the field of UX we have no recognised terminology for evil design? And why has the SEO industry always recognised the difference between black-hat and white-hat practices?

The answer is simple really. Google has a clearly defined set of guidelines, they do a great job of monitoring for black-hat SEO practices and they heavily penalise offenders. Black-hat SEO is kept in check because it’s highly risky.

Black-hat UX is different: it’s subtle, it’s not easily monitored by software algorithms, but worst of all, as a community we’ve never tried to tackle it head on. This needs to change.

About a month ago I wrote a short post on Dark Patterns (“Dirty tricks designers use to make you do stuff”), asking for input on a talk I’m preparing for the UX Brighton conference in September. The response was pretty impressive, with almost 100 comments and loads of conversation over on Hacker News.

So, I’ve taken everyone’s suggestions and put together darkpatterns.org: a black-hat design pattern library. It’s currently in beta (i.e. unfinished), and I’d love further input. I really want this to be a community project – please free to email in suggestions, add comments, or get in touch if you want to co-curate the site with me.

Let’s stop turning a blind eye to black-hat UX. Let’s name the offenders and shame them into giving it up. As a community, it’s well within our power to do this.

I wouldn’t normally blog about job openings but this is special. Our current Creative Director, Glenn Jones, is moving into a new innovation-oriented role at Madgex, giving us the opportunity for a new hire. We’re looking for a new, talented, Creative Director. Could it be you?

Madgex is a world-leading Job Board and CV database provider, used by clients such as The Guardian, Star Tribune, The Times, Trinity Mirror Plc, Haymarket and Total Jobs Group. You may not have heard of us before, probably because we provide white label software – our clients add their own branding. However, Madgex is a force to be reckoned with, powering over 145 job boards globally and catering for roughly 2 million job seekers per week. As the Creative Director, you’d be responsible for managing the design team and overseeing all of the UI design work. We have a big focus on iterative User Experience research, which is where my role comes in – I’d be working closely with you.

Sounds interesting? Check out the job description for more details and feel free to ask me questions: harry@brignull.com.