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Dark Patterns

Every persuasion principle in ux-psychology-principles has a manipulative form: the same mechanism turned against the user. Distilled from ux-psychology-research §9.

They work — that's the problem

  • Mild dark patterns roughly doubled sign-ups for a fake service; aggressive ones roughly quadrupled them, and mild ones drew little backlash (Luguri & Strahilevitz 2021).
  • Hiding fees until checkout raised spending in a StubHub field experiment (Blake et al. 2021).
  • So an honest alternative is not free; it should say what it may cost short-term.

The literature

  • Brignull (2010) coined the term; practitioner catalogue at deceptive.design: trick questions, sneak into basket, roach motel, confirmshaming, forced continuity, hidden costs, bait and switch, disguised ads, …
  • Gray et al. (2018): five strategies — nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference, forced action.
  • Mathur et al. (2019): crawled ~11K shopping sites, found 1,818 instances in 7 categories; 22 vendors sold dark patterns as a service.
  • Gray et al. (2024): ontology harmonising 10 taxonomies into 64 types.
  • EU DSA Art. 25: no interfaces that deceive, manipulate or "materially distort or impair" free and informed decisions; examples: prominence asymmetry, repeated requests, termination harder than signup.
  • FTC (2022): induce false beliefs · hide or delay material information · unauthorized charges · obscure privacy choices.

The three-check test

A persuasive technique is honest only if it passes all three:

  1. Truthful framing — the loss, scarcity, urgency, social proof or progress it claims is real.
  2. Symmetric exit — declining is as easy, visible and emotionally neutral as accepting.
  3. Endorsement — the user would endorse it if they understood it; it would survive being explained on the screen.
Check Catches Anchor
1 Fake urgency, fake scarcity, fake reviews, fake "was" prices, hidden costs, fabricated progress FTC 1–2
2 Roach motel, confirmshaming, visual interference, nagging, preselection DSA 25(3); FTC 4
3 True-and-symmetric but against the user: compulsion loops, margin-driven defaults, forced continuity DSA 25(1); FTC 3

Check 2 is visible on the screen. Check 1 often isn't — a discount's reference price lives in the business, not the pixels. Check 3 is judgement.

Worked example

An upgrade dialog showing the user's files by name, a countdown, and a dismiss button reading "I'll risk it" stacks three patterns: fake urgency (if the timer is arbitrary), confirmshaming, and possibly a false loss. The honest version keeps the real consequences and the real deadline, with a neutral "Not now".