#41: Shining Light on Dark Patterns w/ Ron Bronson

Good morning, designers, developers, coders, DevOps people pick I don’t know who you are. But I’m glad you’re listening to us this morning. You’re listening to the drunken UX podcast. This is episode number 41. shining light, dark patterns with Ron Bronson, who you’ll hear from in just a hot minute 4141 it the number just keeps going up air and that is the way numbers do in fact work. I I’ve written iterations that prove it.

I will. I will. I can do that. I’ve got a couple weeks. I’ve learned everything much more quickly than that in the past. So not too afraid. I’m your host, Michael Fienen.

Ah, you answered first. And I’m not gonna answer just to spite you. Folks, if you are enjoying the podcast, be sure to stop by our sponsors over at New cloud. You can check them out at New cloud in you cloud.com slash drunken UX. They do maps and illustrations and services, and soon to be some 3d Braille maps and things of that nature. Let’s see if you want to find us. There are places to do that. There are the Twitter’s and the Facebook assuming Twitter stays up and doesn’t crash for a million years like it did today. So it wasn’t just me.

More Do you want

are not on Snapchat. I don’t have the time or patience for that. Quite frankly. What? Show me your glass tell? Let me prove to me you’re drinking. Okay. It’s colorful.

Something.

I like dangerous. Let’s see how dangerous it isn’t an hour. I have a glass with ice. It is bourbon this week. we’ve switched gears a little bit but I intentionally have not told Aaron what I’m drinking because I wanted to surprise him that I wanted everybody to hear his action. So I went out. I was restocking the bar and I needed to pick some stuff up and as I was going along the shelves and grabbing some scotch, I found the bottle and I went Oh, I didn’t think I could get that around here. And I found a bottle of basil Hayden’s

So great. So I’m drinking basically, Hayden’s now.

not had it before? No. Tonight is the first night I’ve got to taste. It’s it’s definitely a very early bourbon. It’s got a very kind of green flavor to it.

No, that’s a it’s quite nice. Actually. My like the bottle to the bottles really cool.

I was surprised. I thought it was one of those things that somebody would mention, and I would never find so because I hadn’t had never seen it anywhere before. So yeah, that’s where I am. I want to go over though, to start the night. The morning the afternoon. I don’t know. I don’t know if I should. When I talk about time. When I’m recording. Should I talk about when I’m recording or when I think people are listening? Nobody knows.

that makes sense. That’s probably a good call. Over at the Adobe blog this week, I think it was this week, wasn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah. So I knew not all sometimes we handled things and that’s fine, too. So you set this over?

so you’re a little bit of a slacker but not like a big slacker. Yeah.

So we talked about Don Norman, all the time, for good reason. So take a shot. And he wrote a post over at the Adobe blog. And first off, I just want to mention, because I didn’t even realize this. He’s 83 years old. That’s amazing. And he is still out there carving a path and writing about this stuff and contributing and that is killer, very

that I am that productive. As as next year comes.

So the title of this is why I don’t believe in empathic design. So that’s if you’re wondering why Aaron feel so strongly about it? It does. I mean, it definitely sets up an argument to start with. I’m gonna say that I do kind of see where he’s coming from though.

the idea that he was driving at I think does make sense because empathy works well, on a one to one basis. And when we talk about empathy, especially in personas, we we don’t generally write group personas, we write individual personas with the idea being that we create an individual with which we identify, or at least can understand, you know, not necessarily identified, because they’re us, because that wouldn’t be useful. But we create somebody that lets us get in their shoes. And that’s what empathy is about. at the group level, I think of it more as a study in anthropology, so to speak, like when you’re talking about your users in mass, because at the end of the day, like let’s take a Facebook, you know, somebody that’s obviously big, you have a user base of what a billion users now, it doesn’t do you any good to think about how one user x, you have to start thinking about them a bit in aggregates

yeah, it’s, it is definitely a there, there are some semantics that play into it some philosophy, stuff that plays into it, it does, I think, very much come down to one of those arguments that, well, I but I think that the underlying message that he’s trying to say, is, it’s a forest for the trees kind of thing, that if you especially if you are working somewhere where you’re working on a product that is being used by not even millions of people, you know, thousands of people, if you get on, you know, you can, you can really hyper focus, and that’s something that, you know, I’ve seen in user tests where, like, one like one weird result tends to become kind of a focal point for, you know, writing user stories and things even though, sure it doesn’t represent the whole. And I think that’s kind of what he’s calling against there is, yeah, you do, you have to have empathy, you have to be able to think the way other people think and put yourself in their shoes and and whether you’re thinking of them as groups or individuals, but you can’t let that individual empathy drive. But the

it feels a lot like and, and the way like you’re describing that feels a lot like how I used to talk to people about marketing and content strategy. I’m like, yeah, you know, it’s like a circle is a direct a circle is a square. Square is a rectangle. But a rectangle is always a square kind of thing, where sometimes, yeah, there’s overlap, there’s, you know, depending on what kind of geometry you’re after, there’s just this kind of fuzziness. And I think it just depends on how specific I guess you’re trying to get, you know, at that. And I worry sometimes that like, when you do start talking about this sort of hyper specificity, you know, don’t don’t worry about empathic design, just do Human Centered Design and be done with it.

Well, yeah, yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Like, I don’t know, there’s a lot to be gained by grinding it down to that level of dust.

But the article will be linked over in the show notes. It’s at the Adobe blog, it’s the blog.adobe.com. Go check that out. It’s a great is a great article, it’s a good read, it will at least get you thinking about the way you consider users in the scope of testing and usability. Maybe tilt your approach a little bit because it never hurts to view things from a slightly different angle. If nothing else, are you trying to understand where he’s coming from and what he’s driving at. So with us this evening, we have out of his nice, probably temperate home in Portland, Oregon. I’m guessing it’s not nearly as hot there as it is here. We have Ron Bronson. Ron is a gentleman and a scholar. He’s worked in content strategy, service design, digital communications, new media. I think that that covers it, but I’m sure it probably doesn’t. Let’s just say that he is the guy with whom you want to talk when you start digging into usability and things like this. that fair? I think that’s fair.

At four here right now, so but my sun is going down. I suspect yours is still a little bit up. Unknown Speaker Still very at 6pm.

If you are looking for Ron, and you’re out, you know, at any usability conferences or things like that, be sure to look for him. He’s currently running the conference Scotland with his talk defense against dark patterns. That is, that’s brilliant going to be something Yeah, that if you have the opportunity to see it, absolutely take the time to do that. We do have kind of a super hyper compressed version of that from a brief talk he did at donut JS will have that linked in the show notes. So you can watch it. I think it’s like 11 minutes long, whereas your full talk is like an hour and a half long, isn’t it?

still, you know, it’s good to be missing a few things. So if you have the chance to see the whole talk, absolutely. Take advantage of that. Ron, thank you for joining us this evening. Thanks for sitting down with us. We appreciate you joining us for our our drinks and our usability crap and everything else we’re going to be digging into.

So this evening, we are going to be talking about dark patterns, dark UX, I tend to use those phrases relatively interchangeably. And I want to start with and if you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, you know, I’ve mentioned this a lot. We’ve had several episodes. If you go back and listen to past episodes of real time overview, there’s a bunch of those that covered articles on on dark UX. So Ron, I want to give it over to you though, to give your definition of you know, a dark pattern or dark usability.

know, I like it, I think hostile describes it much.

Yeah, I, I like to tell folks, because, you know, anytime we talk about usability and general, a lot of these concepts have come over from, you know, the architecture world, from the print design world from, you know, all of these different spaces. And it applies here equally, just in different ways. And one of the comparisons I usually give is with casinos, and casinos are intrinsically designed to trick you into staying there. They don’t have clocks on the walls, the way they lay out their exits, so that they are the end of long mazes of rows of slot machines and things like that. The carpets are disorienting patterns to get you to keep looking up at all the flashing lights, there’s, there’s all of this stuff that they have baked in, that is designed to get you to spend more money there when you have decided not to. And that’s where I like that idea of the hostility comes into play, because you’ve made your decision. I’m going to leave this place now I’ve spent my money I’m done. And yet they have employed tactics that say yeah, but

You know, the there’s a comparison to because not everything that is designed to get you to do more or do something that you weren’t thinking about is a hospital pattern. So in this case, let’s talk about like, let’s say I just in fact, you can, my guests can see behind me I’ve got a computer on the table back here. I’m finally after seven years building a brand new computer. I went to Newegg I went to Amazon, I was picking up the parts and everything. Every big e commerce site always has that section. It’s like related items, or you might also like, and those aren’t necessarily hostile, because while they are trying to get you to buy something else, they’re doing it in kind of a passive way. They’re doing it in a way that doesn’t interrupt you, or doesn’t try to trick you like it’s generally under a heading like, you know, people who bought this also bought this stuff. And so there is a difference between trying to use the psychology of relationships and things to get you to do more, or in the outside world. Think about the the hotline in a store. So you go to checkout, and you’ve got the candy rack or you’ve got the impulse item rack. And that that isn’t in your way necessarily. You can walk right past it. You can keep going now the kid and I Aaron, you had a good example of somebody with kids of

that’s getting a little bit close, I think I think you’re starting to push your luck there. But the those tricks though, aren’t as I mean, again, I really like this, right? They aren’t hostile, they aren’t being designed to hurt you trick you or stop you.

So let’s compare this real fast. Because, of course, we we talked about it from like, the the hospital pattern standpoint, to the impulse item kind of approach. There’s also another phrase that gets thrown around, and you used it earlier, anti patterns. And they tend to get kind of lumped together a lot. But at least to me, I have always considered them to be very different. Because when I think about anti patterns, I generally think of them as, like the either the, you know, counter intuitive decisions we might make as designers, or unintentional things we do, like, you know, let’s say somebody who doesn’t really understand color contrast puts, you know, white text on a yellow background. You know, that’s, that is an anti pattern, because you should never do that. But some people haven’t been exposed to the reasoning for that. And I just I wanted to say that out loud. For folks, carousels are one that I come back to I i rail against carousels, I hate them. But people use them. Because when they’re sitting in meetings and thinking about this stuff, they think, Oh, well, if we need to get more content on the homepage, but we can’t take up more space. That’s the best way to do it. And it’s not even that that hurts the user. It’s just a bad approach to usability. Right?

And I think, Aaron, you’d made this comment. And I don’t know if it was while the tape was rolling, or fools before we started, but you made the comment about it’s, you know, the difference between mistakes and malice, like, yeah, it’s okay to make a mistake, that that’s fine. We can teach you to not make mistakes, but we can’t teach you to not be bad.

Yeah. Most people when they learn about a mistake, they grow from it. malice tends to be the kind of thing that you don’t grow. from, you know, it takes a lot more work to get around.

So if anybody is looking for like a really good rundown of this, and wants to get kind of acquainted with all of the terms and the rationale behind it, the the guy who was generally credited as, like, the man who figured this stuff out, so to speak, is Harry brittle. And he started a website back in, I think, 2010, nine, 910 years ago, that’s literally just dark patterns.org. And he’s got definitions there, he links to articles there. And he’s got what they call the Hall of shame. And anytime people tweet out different dark patterns to them, they share those through that resource, so that you can actually see these things in action. And I think, and we’ll talk about it here in a few minutes, that they’re all cloud, what he is built out as classifications, you know, different types, the same way we have different, you know, kinds of usability and things like that. He’s figured out there are very discreet types of hospital design that roll into this that you can start seeing and once you see them, you start picking them out very quickly and easily.

It’s, it’s a difference, right between confirming. And yeah, and trying to stop you. Basically,

This is a great plug back to the video that we mentioned that it’s on the dark patterns site. And I actually maybe I didn’t plug it yet. So good chance to plug it I plugged Ron’s video, there is a video on on YouTube, we’ll have a link to it. That is from nerd rider. And it’s about you know how to see how dark patterns are influencing you. And they use Amazon as their example of what you have to go through to delete an Amazon account, they have actively hidden the way you delete your account. And like that is the worst kind dark patterns that boy, it’s one thing to just like bug somebody you know, and hope they just give up. But Amazon has gone the extra step and said, Yeah, we’re just gonna not make it even remotely easy.

Let’s talk about how this you know, that’s that is what it is, you know, those are the experiences everybody will have a story. If you’ve got a particular story, by all means, share it with us, I’d love to hear you know where you’ve ran into it. There are a lot of ways this stuff comes into design and development. And I mentioned just mentioned the video on YouTube will have a link to that from nerd rider. That’s a good example of how that leaks in that Hall of shame on dark patterns, that is a great resource for seeing these different things. Because what you’ll what you’ll come to find is there are always these small interactions, you know, it’s the one button it’s, it’s the one time they colored a button green when it was a negative action, as opposed to having it be you know, red, or they’ll put a button in the same place as all of your affirmative actions when you’re trying to take a negative action, that the way your reflex response works. The way that a website trains use of a site trains you to click in the lower right corner to do a certain action all the time. And then they decide, well, now we want you to do something for us. And they put that in that same they’re using that train response to do it. reflex actions are very intrinsic to what makes a dark matter successful. And when you get results. You know, it’s a false reinforcement. It’s not working because the user understands it’s working because you’re tricking them. And that’s not good rationale. So I want to go into a little bit of a rabbit hole, then come out of this rabbit hole, and then we’ll go back into it later. Back in Episode 32. We talked about the 10 commandments of UX. Or rather, we talked about somebody else’s article talking about the 10 commandments, a UX, the eighth commandment was you shall make decisions your children’s children will be proud of. And this commandment hid hinged on ethical illness. The actual phrasing of the description is can you make the user stay longer spend more than they should? Or get just a little more addicted? Can you lie to them? Can you guilt trip them to get what you want? Yes, we totally have that sort of power. And the reality of business will potentially result in someone asking you to do so someday or another. I know where I draw the line. I want to draw run into this guy conversation now. When it comes to the ethical component of hostile design, you know, where as a designer or developer, should we stand? Would we get asked that question of Hey, let’s let’s do this, you know, that’s okay. How do we balance that as a designer developer?

hey, I’m drinking bourbon, damn it.

that is why I asked the question, because I think there is a lot of good discussion around what the right solutions are to those things. And whether it is because it is interesting to think about where some of those, those tropes are coming from in terms of, you know, a digital influence, or somebody who’s been doing design for 20 years, and has the luxury of saying, Yeah, you should stand up for that. Because I will say straight up, I’ve been in that position, I’ve been looking at a bad decision that I had to decide, well, I can either do it, or tell them I won’t do it and get fired. But I do still want to make my paycheck. And what I would say and and like the the sort of lightweight counterpoint I would give to it is just because you choose to not throw yourself on the fire, so to speak, or throw yourself on your own sword doesn’t make you unethical, the ethical decision is to do the work and do you know, make sure you are empowered to stay be there, and make sure to encourage and educate, basically, and I’ll use that word later. But

So let’s shift gears a little bit away from the the ethics side, because I’m going to come back to that before we’re done. That let’s just strictly talk about the types where you will see this stuff manifest. So to speak it

17 things. It’s not seven, don’t scare them. Oh, no, it’s 11.

Harry Britain all put together. And it’s it is the same list. If you go to dark patterns.org and click the types of dark pattern link in the header, you will see the same list. I copied it. Sorry, Harry. But it because I mean, this is kind of the de facto structure that people have gone with. So first off, he has sneak into basket. This one is relatively easy. I don’t see this one very often, quite frankly, what what is it and it’s exactly what it sounds like. So if you are you know Agilent shelf at Amazon or Newegg or something and you go to buy something at and when you go check your cart, you realize you’ve got more stuff in there than you wanted, or you have something in there that is like a promo item or whatever that requires you to go through extra steps to get rid of, Oh, I don’t see that very often. Because there is another one that’s going to come up here later, that I think a better fit. But you know, just that idea of like up selling up selling to me is not the same thing. You know, we’re trying to trick somebody end up selling, it’s not at all the same thing for you know, the sneak in the basket.

It’s You know what, what it is, is it’s it’s the hidden checkbox that says, Oh, yeah, do you want to add the four year maintenance agreement? Right, and that gets bolted onto your your shopping cart item, then it’s when you

in. Yeah, anytime you you have, you know, operating conditions. And a lot of the times this will happen with text that is gray, you know, they will make the text very faint or the checkbox very faint. Letters. I don’t know offhand if anybody that I can think of that is bad about that. If you go in and look like they’ve got some and their example is GoDaddy. And GoDaddy is not a bad. Go Daddy is not a terrible example. Mind you. I do feel like I feel like they have improved. And I also feel like they just try to trick you into up selling more than they are actually trying to sneak something into your basket. But

it. Yeah, that’s an interesting, like, variation on the concept. Like, yeah, I want to basket, I want to do one thing, but you’re going to bundle some stuff. Yeah, it is a similar principle. Yeah. And I don’t, I would say it falls into this, mainly because I don’t think any of the other ones apply. So I’ll take that. I like that. Or run. Can you think of any? Are there any current ones that you know of that would fall into this type?

I, the and you know what, I’ll defend the the idea of going through the types, if only because I think it helps. for somebody like me, let’s say like somebody who does understand the concept, if you can, if you see one in the wild, and you want to go to the company and say, Hey, you guys are doing this, it’s this kind of bad thing. I think that helps in making a case to encourage them to change it rather than just saying, I don’t I don’t like this, it doesn’t feel right to like that this gives it agency to enforce change, I think is where that

What I have seen in the wild quite frequently and they have encountered is roach motel.

Yeah. Easy to get in. Yeah, hard to get out. And that’s I mean, most sites, quite frankly, even with stuff with, you know, the increasing attention to the GDPR January 1 2020, CCP a comes into effect. That’s the California Consumer Protection Act that has many of the same requirements as GDPR, that ability to easily say I want to cancel my account is going to increase in in prominence, and you’re not going to be able to get away. And I think folks like Facebook and Amazon are going to be faced with that, that they can’t hide your ability to do that anymore. I’m going to talk about legislation here in a little bit. And I think this is one area where I think it is absolutely appropriate that you know, telling a site that you have to let people leave that that’s has to be a thing. I mean, come on. But yeah, the roach motel comes up all the time any anywhere that you pay somebody basically

And Ron, you made a comment earlier that was just alluding to like the individual circumstances, there are so many reasons, somebody may want to close a Facebook account, maybe they’re being stopped. Maybe they are getting death threats because of an article that quoted them. You know, if you’re on a service like, you know, Hulu or sling or DirecTV, maybe you just lost your job, and you can’t afford that service anymore. There are genuine logistical reasons people need to take that action that you need to honor and respect. And I would argue that those reasons probably outweigh the people who are just like, Fuck your service. I don’t want to be here anymore.

this. Third one is a fantastic name privacy’s occurring, fantastic name that’s just tricking you into giving away your information, basically, oh, OK. We’re going to make all this stuff public, or you’re consenting to this advertising. You think about the checkboxes on opt in forms and all this stuff that’s like, hey, and the the fun misdirection tactic that comes in here is, check this box, if you want to opt out, you know, kind of thinking like we were trying to get you to give us all of your information and let us do stuff with it.

So as we plow ahead, price comparison prevention. This is one I’m going to say again, I haven’t seen very much but the one place where I have seen it. And I don’t think it’s intentional I so I wouldn’t necessarily call it hostile design. But I would just call it bad planning is Amazon. And if you’ve ever tried to price things that are bulk packaged, and they will under the price, they’ll say something like this item is 97 cents an ounce, right or a you know, $1 10 per item. But across multiple items that aren’t the same. Yeah, they the units change, or they won’t have it at all supermarkets do that a lot more. A 12 pack of an item will just be priced as one unit. That’s where I think that gets bad. And I like that I don’t think that’s Amazon’s fault.

Speaking of which, not at all the same, but Miss direction is the next one.

good segue not really well played. This misdirection is I mean, self explanatory. That’s where you are trying to get people look one way while you’re doing something else on the side, I actually think they sneak in the basket had the GoDaddy example. I think GoDaddy is much more in the misdirection area,

So this is all about? I like pop ups as a case of misdirection. Okay, especially when they try to confuse where the closed buttons are. If you’ve ever seen like, this, this process of hide the close button, putting the green button or something where where it is, or even better, the flash event siloed content? Do you remember this? Fuck, yeah. So when banner ads come into play, they have a space that they come into. But on some websites, they don’t include any kind of styling that keeps that space open until the ad loads, because you’re going to go up and click on something. And when you go in and click on it, that ended up saying, Yeah, in the time, it takes your brain, the process where you’re going to go, the ads coming in. And so you are misdirected in the clicking on that ad. And in a lot of cases, that makes people money, just by the click through you know, somebody is getting charged for the click impression. So there is there is an incentive to misdirect people in terms of where, like, literally misdirect them physically on the page. So I think that also falls into that. You know, in my opinion, hidden costs, his next hidden cost generally applies to anything, you know, we’ve seen hotels, Ticketmaster, I hate Ticketmaster, I refuse this with them. A lot of airline websites, up until the last couple of years had this problem, you know, that just this idea of trying to keep all the taxes and fees and where they,

I don’t think and what comes to mind is like, I haven’t used Airbnb yet. I don’t think they have anything like that. I don’t know if you guys have used it.

After hidden costs, you have bait and switch, bait and switch is the one and this one bait and switch in this direction, I think there’s a lot of overlap, at least to me, because the bait and switch, I tend to apply to things like when you have buttons that you know lead you down a path, and then you swap where the buttons are,

that’s that, to me, tends to be bait and switch. But it does require you to set up a expectation that that’s where it’s going to be before you know otherwise, it is just a misdirection. Another place where I see it is anytime there is a cancel versus continue option. And your continue option is really big. And the cancel option is really small. And they’re trying to get you to click on the wrong thing. In those cases,

Right? Yeah, that would be one too, because you’re doing the same size, anytime, especially colors, right in green or abused. Because green is always perceived as kind of an affirmative action, I want to approve something. And people will use that as a way to, you know, hide that you’re doing something you don’t want to do. There’s an example in that nerd writer video where in a mobile app, when they teach you through the whole application, that every time you’re done with something, you get a green button, the lower right, and it takes you to the next step, until you lose the game. And then once you lose a game, the pop you get is a green button in the lower right, but it drives you into a micro transaction, instead of just continuing. And so what they’ve done is they set up this pattern, and this is why I say misdirection and bait and switch to me, there’s a lot of overlap, like they are intentionally trying to get you to do the thing. And then when you click the button, it has routed you into a whole other funnel, right? Don’t like it. Confirm shaming.

can confirm shaming is

know that that also I think falls into the same, the same deal.

you know, there’s a whole different set of these, you know, like, when you get junk mail, and you get that envelope that just looks like a, you know, just plain old legal envelope that, you know, has what looks like a government office address in the corner and everything to get you to open it. And it’s like a, Hey, did you know you can save 25% on your life insurance?

That actually I think goes into the next one, though, which is disguised to add. Good setup for that actually. Was that intentional? What What do they call it advertisement? I think is the phrase that gets thrown around a little bit or anytime I have, because I do keep up with tech articles and things like that, you know, and I used to actually work for a hardware review website. So to me, this is especially kind of like sticky in terms of knowing if the thing you’re reading has been paid for. Hmm, yeah.

And this happens in newspapers, it happens in magazines, it happens on the radio on your Nightly News, all of these segments that are presented like news, but they aren’t news. And everybody knows that they’re being dishonest by doing that. But they are doing it in that way. Because they want you to trust it more. And we do it on the web just as much.

You don’t even know it. It’s ads in ads, it’s ads all the way down, brother, it’s

Amazon is super bad about this. Anybody if you’ve searched for something, and the first search result is always a sponsored result. But they don’t present it differently. And the only way you can tell is if it happens if you happen to see that little sponsored. And what is it it’s great text on a white background that says sponsored. That’s a disguise that all the way through Google in.

do you remember when source forge was like the go to, for all things open source? And then they declined greatly. They’ve since been bought by I think geek net is who owns them now. And they’ve done a ton of work to it. And I had a conversation with one of the folks who bought them at one point. And he was telling me about some of this stuff. But leading up to that. Remember how hard it was today download stuff from source forge? Because every time you went to a product page, all the ads said download now.

That’s a disguise that I mean that that is a hospital pattern writ large, you know, making your advertising be the download button and being more like it was more in your face than the actual download button was. And I feel like that was an intentional choice on source for source gorgeous part.

Yeah, first continuity is a big one. That’s any, anytime you sign up for a service, and they offer you a free trial, and but the free trial still requires you to put in your regard. That’s forced continuity, because you know, at the end of that trial, they’re going to start charging you and they’re going to force you to opt out of the service at the end of it rather than opt in. Right. So it’s just a case of turning, you know, consent backwards. Basically, you have to tell me not to do it not tell me to do it. Right, that shows up in a lot of services. A lot of the streaming services, I think still have that I and my experience is a little limit I haven’t used to lose. So I don’t know,

to an extent I also see this in services that auto renew, especially like year over year, and don’t send you a warning.

So that’s forced continuity. The very last one, and then we’ll get into our closing segment is friend spam. And if anybody wonders what friends Spam is, I think I hope most of our users probably will have some recollection of the lawsuit that came against LinkedIn. What the? Do you remember this lawsuit where LinkedIn had a system that recommended you to your friends? And what it did was, when you clicked through the process, it would give you a list, you know, it would check your you would say, you know, oh, yeah, look at my contacts, what? Or, you know, here are people you’re connected to, you’re doing something, hey, do you want to let these folks know, and it would send an email to all of them on your behalf? Okay, they settled, I think it was something like $13 million, they settled this lawsuit for this class action for this was a few years ago, before they got super, super big, but it was still I mean, they were still a big service at that point. But their whole thing was the process by which they said, Hey, do you want to contact all these people? They did this sort of harassment cycle to try to trick you into clicking okay. And and in some cases, there were like two or three clicks you had to get through to not have that happen. And then they would ask you over and over, like, if you were updating data or taking different actions, they would ask you, hey, we saw you just change your job. Do you want to let your friends know? And it would email if you had 1000 people in your contact list, they would email all 1000? devil? Oh, it was awful. The mobile app did at the website did it. So let’s round out the show here by talking about how we deal with this as designers, as developers, as UX people. Because, like Ron, you were saying you’re going to run up against this. And it’s unrealistic to think that it is worth losing your job over every time it comes up. Like that’s, that is not the right answer. Clearly, my argument is, and I alluded to this is always be an advocate for your users. Know that these things exist and know when you’re doing something wrong. And if you do feel like you are kind of undermining that, that pattern, use it as a chance to come back in another three months or six months with some data and say, Hey, remember that thing we did? I want to show you this and try to encourage better tactics. I think that’s one of the big things. And that’s the difference, I think also between you and in this current conversation of ethics in design. I think that’s the real difference maker is the people who are willing to just do what they’re asked and never question it versus, do the thing, not feel great about it, and use it as an opportunity to try to effect change over time and not going to happen quick, guys, I’m going to tell you right now, it because you may not get the opportunity to change it quickly. It may be a six months, a year down the road before you revisit it, but just always being that voice or at least making sure you’re putting up the fight on behalf of the users and saying, Hey, guys, I don’t think this is what we want to do. I think that’s like step one. From there, I think we go into making sure we question test results, right? I said this earlier that you can do a user test and get great results out of a certain pattern. But that doesn’t mean the pattern is good. It just means that you’ve tricked people into doing it. And that’s something to watch out for. And there’s not a good way to do that, mind you. It is something to kind of be on the lookout for, especially if you already think that there, you know, there’s a center there, in terms of, you know, you’re trying to trick users into doing something it’s like, Let’s sit down and look at these numbers. Let’s, you know, God forbid, talk to some of those users. Let’s ask them why they were successful in that in that trade. And see, if it reinforces the idea that, Oh, I didn’t actually mean to click that. But it got me where I was going. Like that can tell you a lot and it it still puts you in sort of that first position of advocating for your users if you know, you think there’s something wrong there, talking to them, and just understanding that what you need to build is right, is that, does that sound like a compromise there, Ron, in terms of that idea of the ethical debate, like be the good person, so to speak?

So that actually comes back to an idea that I use, which is, just make sure that like, if you’re building something that you’re writing negative stories, make sure you write that story of, hey, somebody’s spouse died, and they want to cancel their account or, you know, those, find those negative use cases, the reason somebody would want to leave, and make sure you’re writing those user stories and accounting for them. Because like you were said, Ron, you I think you alluded to this, that, you know, we we met, we don’t think about those situations, and we don’t build for them. We spend so much time thinking about how we get we don’t think about how to let go and that let letting go is such an important part of the process.

Yeah, it’s I’ve ever variations on the

The reason I want to emphasize to that, you know, is important for us to take this on and to be cognizant of these things and avoid them learn from them get better from them. I mentioned earlier, there is legislation that is out there that is trying to deal with this. And I liken it to, you know, have a cute name. It does have a cute name. It’s awful. It’s it’s called the detour act.

Yeah. It’s it’s this long, weird, name it. So the reason we have movie ratings, is because movies were starting to get objectionable to people. And the federal government came in and went to the NPA and said, Hey, if you don’t do something about this, we’re going to start. And so the NPA said, we don’t want the government involved in this will make up our own rating system to make people happy. But it’s and they did. But that that’s why our rating system is the way it is.

the system is terrible. But it’s arguably better than anything the government would put in place, but I

But that’s the thing, though. And that’s what the detour act is kind of at and if you go look, there’s a Gizmodo article about it. We’ll have that link in the show notes. in that article, they also have a link to the the text of the the Act. The thing is, especially when it comes to things like hospital design, what is hostile is very subjective, in some cases, and they include some descriptions of things that I think should scare web designers and web developers in one. In one case, they say you have to have an independent review board, if you’re going to perform behavioral and psychological experiments. But that’s not defined,

right? That’s where my thinking goes is like, Is it an A B test, a behavioral experiment?

it’s one of those things that you know, if if you if you don’t conform, conformance will be forced upon you. And I don’t love that I like I love that idea. Less than anything,

right now that the Act says it’s only going to target websites that have 100 million or more active monthly users, which is, I mean, that’s really narrowing down who that is. But I also feel like that really is then really, though, are you down in a way that is also not productive?

Yeah. And I think the the underlying kind of current there is, you know, unethical is bad, working against the interests of the users bad, I also don’t think that that means it has to be illegal. That seems like a very aggressive jump at that point. And it, it gets to where you’re trying to use some of that as a weapon for change, as opposed to a lesson for change. If you don’t care, somebody’s going to start caring for you. And I would rather have that power under my own control than having a thrust upon me. One thing you can do in that area, and and as we went through that list of all these different categories of, of hospital design, the way that you can use this as, as us as people who get it and understand it and learn about this stuff, be willing to call out a company when you see it, Henry wrote an article for a list apart back in 2011, where he was talking about dark patterns and honesty and UI design. And in that article, he talks about Audible, an audible got called out on part of their forced continuity process by user. And as a result, audible said, Hey, we get it, we fixed it. And we welcome any other input as well, if other people find stuff, so that they make their process better. So you can absolutely influence these things. Like you have that power. And a lot of companies, especially smaller ones, are actually really receptive. If you’re not an asshole, when you go about if you just say, Hey, did you guys know like, this is really counterintuitive and harmful to the user. And here’s why that process can be very productive and getting people to change and make things better.

As a designer, as a developer, just be open to learning. Make sure you go out and ask for feedback on your on your work and get you know input on that stuff. Have people smarter than you tell you what may or may not be wrong and be open receptive to that if you can do user testing, and take time out to explicitly ask about any annoyances they had in that process. Because just because somebody can complete an action doesn’t mean it’s optimal. And doesn’t mean it’s in your best interest. So make sure you ask about the things that gotten their way. Because they may not say that, in the process of testing it, you know, when you’re having a dialogue with them.

real underlying part to this that I think, and this comes with experience, and it comes with technique, and it comes with time, is learning when business goals are defining the user funnel, as opposed to the user journey defining the funnel, because funnels are an important part of business, and they drive the financial side of our business. But the users journey should be the part that is defining that you should get the user to where the business wants by virtue of the user completing their stuff. You shouldn’t be trying to force it or trapping them into that process. Because it’s a business goal. That’s where you get these things like forest continuity, misdirection, you know, stuff, adding the cards, all of those things happen.

yeah, so the last thing I’ve got on my list is teach. And that’s where I hope we come in, I hope folks have found this useful, I hope you found it helpful, I hope it’s shed some light on some ideas or encourage you to look at stuff. I have a sub point listed here that says Code of Conduct question mark, I have in the past on the show, you know mentioned that I think that it would be good for, as an industry to have some kind of Hippocratic oath, so to speak, that kind of helps define or guide us so to speak. Ron, obviously, you have other thoughts, some in that area. But I think the the mantra, though, of teaching is universal. And this idea of, we can’t get better if we aren’t making sure to train the people who are you know, getting trapped in anti patterns, for instance, taking that time out of our schedule to you know, see something and help and even when I say said earlier, you know, giving feedback to other companies and and what you see, because you don’t know what the experience level of the people are, who are building some of those things. So it can be very helpful, I think, to share your experience and knowledge and try to lift up those those developers and designers.

Yeah. So, Ron, I’m going to give you the last word on this in terms of from a teaching standpoint, from the outreach standpoint, what can people do to help others get better at avoiding dark patterns or deal with them when they come up in their workflow?

Awesome. Well, folks, stick with us we’re going to take a quick break and we will be right back little will let you know where Ron’s gonna be and what’s going on and what we can going on and all those things. That back, relax. See you back here in 60 seconds. The drunken UX podcast is brought to you by our friends at New cloud. New cloud is an industry leading interactive map provider who has been building location based solutions for organizations for a decade. Are you trying to find a simple solution to provide your users with an interactive map of your school, city or business? Well, new clouds interactive map platform gives you the power to make and edit a custom interactive map in just minutes. They have a team of professional cartographers who specialize in map illustrations of many different styles and are ready to design and artistic rendering to fit your exact needs. One map serves all of your users devices with responsive maps that are designed to scale and blend in seamlessly with your existing website. To request a demonstration, or to view their portfolio, visit them online at New cloud dot com slash drunken UX that’s in you cloud.com slash drunken UX. Ron, thank you so much for sitting down with us this evening. I know that, you know, your time is certainly valuable. But at least you can still get some daylight maybe left over there. It is pitch black here. So thanks for sitting down with us. I want to give you the microphone here for a couple of minutes. Let everybody know where they can find you if you’ve got any speaking engagements coming up where they can check out your your talk or anything else that you’ve got going on.

Awesome. Let’s see. That’s wrong. Aaron. I’m going to pitch the ball over to you. No, I’m not. I’m not gonna do that. We already had this conversation. I you You brought us in. I’ll

Yeah, I know I’m not good at this anymore. Folks. If you want to find us, be sure to check us out online on Facebook or Twitter. We are slash stroking UX. You can get us on Instagram at broken UX podcast. Also make sure to take a second out of your day, we would appreciate it if you’d stop by iTunes or Stitcher, whatever. Leave us a rating or review whatever podcast app you use, just hit the like button or the star button and just let other folks though you’re enjoying the show. It’s useful to us it’s helpful it it helps us build our audience and extend our reach and get our

Voice all over other people. Weird, everybody. After having this conversation, I think we’ve taught you a lot. I think we’ve helped educate and I think we’ve reached out in the best way that we know how to do and the only thing that that leaves me with is one last piece of advice and I think it’s important. I think it’s something that is worth reinforcing. So I tell you every episode to keep your personas close and your users closer

if they agree to opt in