How dark pattern manipulate our life in the digital world

Today, we live in this mainstream of Big Data, and the internet builds the platform for us to know about the new world, people rely on it to buy commodities and contact with each other. Followed by this trend, the information explosion is not a new thing, which implied that now audience may not pay all attention to every information that people had seemed.

As a result, it is an obvious and common thing in our daily life when we searched for one thing before, and the relative advertisement pops up on our social platform. Those facts reveal that our personal information had exported to three parties when we signed for the web and unconsciously agree to share our privacy to stakeholders.

As the introduction from the video above, we may find that we have a similar experience when we found our search history became the advertisement and popped up on our social platform. This system seems like the maze trick, enterprises design this system for the user to easier engage into it and find the treasure, and then the user would hardly find the exit to leave.

Nevertheless, this kind of design is debating for a decade in the human-computer interface (HCI) area. As the awareness of ethical design raised, prior studies acknowledged that dark pattern is shaped from persuasive design [2] when the design is inherently a persuasive act [3][4].

Hence, to answer the question about the specific tool, which is empowered to cause the digital issue in the 21st century, this essay will be based on the ethical issue in user experience (UX) area. Furthermore, holding some examples when the dark pattern is designed for the user journey secretly.

Types of Dark Pattern

On the other hand, the research from Mathur et al. [5] targeted on how dark pattern influenced the user’s decision making. Based on the classification, they defined the taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics. Also, the finding from Mathur et al. [5] revealed that many types of dark patterns operate by the cognitive psychology that the knowledge of UX designer. Since Xiao and Benbasat [6] found that users would be affected by the deceptive marketing practices in online shopping, and they would be influenced by the affective mechanisms such as psychological or emotional motivation and the cognitive mechanisms such as perceptions about a product.

Hence, Mathur et al. [5] proposed finding below to demonstrate the types of dark patterns and how it utilises people’s cognitive bias and the most common type of dark pattern.

As the figure demonstrated above is evident that the low-stock message is the most common type in the dark pattern, while the second type is countdown timer from urgency category. Both of those are utilised the scarcity bias to be the psychological strategies to trigger user.

The common of scarcity bias that current website utilised while Booking.com is accused that they utilise vary of scarcity to manipulate the audience to order their product [7][8][9].

Thus, the next series of article will discover the two most typical types — (i) Low-stock message and (ii) Countdown timer of dark pattern in Booking.com and to discuss both sides. In order to elaborate on these two types of dark pattern, the cases from Booking.com would be utilised to analysis. How this design connects to the business strategies and how to influence the audience from a psychological perspective would be discussed further.

Reference

[1] Greenberg, S., Boring, S., Vermeulen, J., & Dostal, J. (2014, June). Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: a critical perspective. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (pp. 523–532).

[2] Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018, April). The dark (patterns) side of UX design. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–14).

[3] Redström, J. (2006, May). Persuasive design: Fringes and foundations. In International Conference on Persuasive Technology (pp. 112–122). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

[4]Nodder, C. (2013). Evil by design: Interaction design to lead us into temptation. John Wiley & Sons.

[5] Mathur, A., Acar, G., Friedman, M. J., Lucherini, E., Mayer, J., Chetty, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–32.

[6] Xiao, B., & Benbasat, I. (2011). Product-related deception in e-commerce: a theoretical perspective. Mis Quarterly, 35(1), 169–196.

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