Last month, I was reading through the posts on one of my favorite nerdy blogs, OSnews, and came across something that interested me enough that I felt the need to share it on my own blog: most websites use dark patterns to manipulate their users to perform actions desirable for the website owner, but generally not for the user.
A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns.
Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests.
ICPEN
As I said, I originally read it on OSnews, so here is the link to the post there. I couldn’t agree more with what the author wrote about it there. Having to deal with cookie banners is annoying enough, but then having to click through a hundred different popups just to get to the actual content of the website is really off-putting.
In fact, I make it a point to never sign up for anything I have to close in order to access a website’s content. Want me to sign up for your newsletter? You’d better damn well not make me deal with it before I’ve had a chance to even see what your site has to offer. Want me to not block ads on your website? Maybe you’d be better off letting me see the content on your website first before I make that decision.
It’s frustrating and leads to the worst user experience you can have. Marketers and business people may not understand that, but it doesn’t take a lot of common sense to see why such dark patterns are so utterly obnoxious.
