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.
Great site — you can tell I like it as I just left lots of comments on there :)
Another possible category: when you highlight or click on a website, pop up/under ads are launched in order to bypass pop up blockers.
And… Flash rollover ads that expand over a page when you mouseover them.
Thanks Harry, this is awesome. I hope there will be a way to search by company name, so you can check whether a company is shady before dealing with them.
Today’s “Twifficiency” fiasco is a perfect example of dark patterns. Would have been nice if people could check them out before authorizing access.
Just a little addition to the naming and shaming:
/www.deviceanduserexperience.com
Dark pattern no1: The form to download the report from the 2010 conference has the closing text ‘Carefully selected third parties may contact you with relevant industry news and offers, tick here if you don’t want to receive them’ but the checkbox has the letter ‘Y’ beside it. So when scanning the page you interpret ticking the box as saying ‘Yes’ to the ‘…carefully selected third parties…’ blurb.
This irritated me.
Dark pattern no2: the post event report from the 2010 confernce was actually 2 slides with a summary paragraph and listing of attendees. Not much of a report.
Conclusion – they think I have time to spare so I will not be attending their conference!
harry – bit weird that on this page (and this site?) that when you hover on a link it turns the same appearance as normal text (i.e. no underline, no blue) as if it to say “nah this isn’t a link” (latest firefox on mac), fair enough it doesn’t stop me clicking the link, but it’s not very friendly