Four Common Deceptive Patterns in UX Design

Pre-Intro: This is my first article in Medium and, I am highly excited to share my knowledge with the readers. One of the Google UX Professional Certificate courses educated me about deceptive patterns and, I had a deep interest to know more about them.

Introduction

User Experience is imperative for any product to be robust and tall in any market. The products or services launched must satisfy users’ needs and expectations. Humans interact with digital products and are thrilled and enthused by the services offered. These products create phenomenal experiences by understanding and researching the users, keeping the users as a primary point. This type of approach can help yield good results for businesses. And at times, it can manipulate and drive users’ intentions and decisions in the wrong direction, benefiting the commercial and financial aspects of business only.

Deceptive or dark patterns trick users into unintentionally completing an action. These patterns mislead the users into doing something that they might not want to do. These patterns might dissuade the prominent users from interacting with a product. It also leads to a decline in overall user experience and hence leading to a bad business.

Types of Deceptive Patterns

Deceptive patterns have evolved for a long time. It is peculiarly observed when interacting with a digital product.

1. Bait and Switch: This type of deceptive pattern occurs when a user takes an action and expects the desired outcome, instead ends up experiencing a different result. Example: Imagine you are navigating through a flight booking app. You see that the flight ticket price for a flight scheduled on Monday is 700 dollars. As soon as you tap into the “Monday” tab, it shows a price of 1000 dollars. This situation could haunt a user and might frighten them. It is a bad user experience and might not attract the user to use the product again!
2. Disguised Ads: This type of deceptive pattern is adopted when ads camouflaged on a page reflect as a part of regular content. These ads can mislead the users and dissatisfy them when they click on such ads. Example: I am sure everyone will have experienced this! You are on a website and, you find two download buttons. One of the download buttons is visually appealing and prompts the user to click on that button. But, this button is an ad that leads the users elsewhere. The users’ decision resulted in an unsatisfactory outcome. It can irritate users and make them feel not to visit the page again.
3. Hidden Cost: This deceptive pattern is observed when a user experiences an increase in cost for an item that isn’t revealed in the earlier stages of the user flow. Example: The most common example is an online food ordering app. Most of the food ordering apps do not show the tax and delivery fees when displaying food items. The user only notices it once the user proceeds to the final cart page. It could upset the user for an additional increase in cost.
4. Misdirection: This type of deceptive pattern can mislead and baffle the users to make a decision. Imagine you are unsubscribing a newsletter and, a prompt appears “Are you sure you want to unsubscribe?”, the text on the button is “No, Cancel me.” It baffles the user to make a decision and is hard to understand. At times, options are made almost invisible such that users are accustomed to deciding from the visible set of options only. For example: Imagine you are booking a flight, and it’s an option to register for travel insurance. The option to opt-out could be inserted at the end of the dropdown list, or in-between options such that it’s hard to find.

There are a lot of other deceptive patterns. As a UX designer, it is imperative to be aware of deceptive patterns and be upfront with the users. It leads to optimistic and user-friendly designs and eliminating the unethical approaches that could haunt the user.