In their MozFest 2022 Defeating Deceptive Design: Getting Control of Our Online Lives online session, Ame Elliott of Simply Secure, Carlos Iglesias from the World Wide Web Foundation, and Kaushalya Gupta of the World Wide Web Foundation shared initial research findings from their Tech Policy Design Lab on deceptive design.
The presentation was short, followed by interactive sessions in breakout rooms to discuss deceptive design, barriers to change, and brainstorm methods for addressing deceptive design.
Glad to see their set of ground rules at the beginning of the session, which included:
- Ask clarifying questions at any time, save open questions for the discussion (when is the discussion?)
- Write your opinion freely in silent individual activities
- Say your opinion freely in group activities
- Mute yourself if during the silent individual activities
- Write in the chat when you take a break
Here are my notes.
Defeating Deceptive Design: Getting Control of Our Online Lives
- Deceptive design or dark patterns are manipulative practices built into user interfaces that obscure, subvert, or impair a person’s autonomy, decision-making, or choice
- Often carefully designed into tricking people into taking actions they didn’t attend to take
- People have very different perspectives of what deceptive design means, it’s contextual
- If you’ve ever been tricked into doing something online or found yourself frustrated trying to cancel an online subscription, you’ve experienced deceptive design
- Prefer to use “deceptive design” phrase over “dark patterns”
- The phrase “dark patterns” reinforces exclusionary framing that dark is bad and light is good. The design community has shifted to using the “deceptive design” phrase. It also makes it easy for people who aren’t designers to better understand the concept.
- Specific patterns encourage people to give up more of their personal data than they intend, also influence people to stay online longer (which gives more opportunities to be tracked and data collected)
- Another deceptive practice: buttons that make people spend more money than they intend. Often related to finances, subscription models, hidden costs. The additional cost is enabled by default, even though you may not have requested it.
- Freedom of choice: how platforms influence your default applications and make it difficult to people to use competitive products/applications. Example: how Windows uses a prompt to set Microsoft Edge as the recommended browser on a new Windows computer.
- After a brief presentation, attendees broke out to multiple rooms to begin activities and discussion about deceptive design
- First question in the breakout room: what is the most important factor in combating deceptive design: privacy, consumer protection, or competition?
- What’s next? Gather evidence of harms associated with deceptive design through consultations, generate solutions, advocate and reach out to stakeholders and decision makers
Resources to Learn More About Deceptive Design
- Web Foundation’s Tech Policy Design
- Tech Policy Design Lab Project Brief
- Dark Patterns Tip Line
- How Dark Patterns Trick You Online (six-minute YouTube video)
- Dark Patterns: How design seeks to control us (ten-minute TEDx video)
