Workshop around Evil design and darkpatterns held at Booster conferance 2014

1. Let’s be evil! And get
away with it!
Let us play with dark patterns
Fredrik Johnsson @hakhap

2. Who
might
I
be
• Interaction designer
• Computas AS
• Malmö, Sweden

3. Know
thy
enemy
• Evil By Design
• Dark patterns

4. Let
us
play
• Meet and greet
• Select a site amongst yourselves
• Or use www.boosterconf.no

5. Most
travelled
road
• Path of least resistance
• Pre-pick your preferred option
• Make options hard to find or understand
• Negative options (don’t not sign up)

6. Envy
• Create something aspirational
• Ownership before purchase
• Advertise status

7. 1
Use least resistance
Use Envy

8. Pride
• Dispel doubt by repeating positive messages
• Gain public commitment
• Certification and endorsement
• Personal messages hit home

9. Much
more
• Make it into a game
• Don’t finish, win
• Skill, not luck

10. 2
Use pride
Use greed

11. Desirable
• Say “I love you”
• In-group
• Make something free

12. 3
Use desire

13. Dark
patterns
A Dark Pattern is a type of user interface
that appears to have been carefully crafted
to trick users into doing things, such as
buying insurance with their purchase or
signing up for recurring bills.

14. Bait
and
Switch
This is one of the oldest
tricks in the book, and it is
very broad in nature – many
dark patterns involve some
kind of bait & switch
The user sets out to
do one thing,
but a different,
undesirable thing
happens instead.

15. Faraway
Bill
With snail mail bills, you
received a detailed
breakdown each month. With
online bills, few companies
will email you the detailed
breakdown, citing security
concerns. Instead, you have
to remember to log in, then go
through the tedious process
of navigating to your most
recent bill. As a result, a
certain proportion of people
just don’t bother – and as a
result they forget about the
costs of the service, and
aren’t able to react
unexpected additions to the
bill.
Utility companies
traditionally sent out
monthly bills by snail
mail, but today they tend
to put them online –
leading to bills that are
rarely seen and easily
forgotten. How you
receive your bills is
framed by companies as
a choice between “offline”
and “online”, but is in fact
also a decision of “push”
versus “pull”.

16. Trick
Question
The user is required to
respond to a question
(typically in the checkout
process), which, when
glanced upon quickly
appears to ask one thing,
but if read carefully, asks
another thing entirely.

17. Misdirection
The attention of the user
is focused on one thing in
order to distract its
attention from another.

18. Sneak
into
basket
The user attempts to
purchase a specific item.
However, somewhere in
the purchasing journey
the site sneaks an
additional item into their
basket, often through the
use of an opt-out radio
button or checkbox on a
prior page.

19. 4
Use any or all of the dark patterns and
evil design to create the «ultimate one»

20. Fredrik
Johnsson
Senior interaction designer
@hakhap
Computas.com
http://darkpatterns.org/
http://evilbydesign.info/