Deceptive patterns are designs that force the user to take an action that is not in their best interest. They are prolific on the web because they are phenomenally effective at boosting conversions. However, their use is unethical and legally problematic.
This article provides an overview of how deceptive patterns can manifest and discusses how to identify them in your designs.
Deceptive patterns harm users by causing financial loss, loss of privacy, and legal control. Furthermore, deceptive patterns are more likely to be successful with vulnerable users, such as time-poor users or users with lower literacy and digital literacy levels, making this practice even more troubling. Designers should avoid and actively argue against the use of deceptive patterns.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein define sludge as “any aspect of choice architecture consisting of friction that makes it harder for people to obtain an outcome that will make them better off (by their own lights).” Some deceptive patterns are sludges. For instance, a cookie-consent dialog that makes the user click through many screens to reject targeting or marketing cookies is an example of sludge. However, deceptive patterns can include deceit, trickery, emotional manipulation, and friction.
Deceptive patterns are prolific on the web and in digital design. A 2019 study by researchers from Princeton University and the University of Chicago found deceptive design patterns were present on over 10% of a sample of 11,000 popular ecommerce sites on the web. Another study by researchers from the University of Zurich in 2019 found that deceptive patterns were present in 95% of 240 free, trending apps sampled from the Google Play store, and over half of these apps had an average of 7 deceptive patterns.
