Journal tags: deceptive

Harry popped ’round to the Clearleft studio yesterday. It’s always nice when a Clearleft alum comes to visit.

It wasn’t just a social call though. Harry wanted to run through the ideas he’s got for his UX London talk.

Wait. I buried the lede. Let me start again.

Harry Brignull is speaking at this year’s UX London!

Yes, the person who literally wrote the book on deceptive design patterns will be on the line-up. And judging from what I heard yesterday, it’s going to be a brilliant talk.

It was fascinating listening to Harry talk about the times he’s been brought in to investigate companies accused of deliberately employing deceptive design tactics. It involves a lot of research and detective work, trawling through internal communications hoping to find a smoking gun like a memo from the boss or an objection from a beleaguered designer.

I thought about this again today reading Nic Chan’s post, Have we forgotten how to build ethical things for the web?. It resonates with what Harry will be talking about at UX London. What can an individual ethical designer do when they’re embedded in a company that doesn’t prioritise user safety?

It’s like a walking into a jets pray of bullshit, so much so that even those with good intentions get easily overwhelmed.

Though I try, my efforts rarely bear fruit, even with the most well-meaning of clients. And look, I get it, no on wants to be the tall poppy. It’s hard enough to squeeze money from the internet-stone these days. Why take a stance on a tiny issue when your users don’t even care? Your competitors certainly don’t. I usually end up quietly acquiescing to whatever bad are made, praying no future discerning user will notice and think badly of me.

It’s pretty clear to me that we can’t rely on individual people to make a difference here.

Still, I take some encouragement from Harry’s detective work. If the very least that an ethical designer (or developer) does is to speak up, on the record, then that can end up counting for a lot when the enshittification hits the fan.

If you see something, say something. Actually, don’t just say it. Write it down. In official communication channels, like email.

I remember when Clearleft crossed an ethical line (for me) by working on a cryptobollocks project, I didn’t just voice my objections, I wrote them down in a memo. It wasn’t fun being the tall poppy, the squeeky wheel, the wet blanket. But I think it would’ve been worse (for me) if I did nothing.

When I was braindumping my thoughts prompted by last week’s UX Fest conference, I wrote about dark patterns.

Well, actually I wrote about deceptive dark patterns. That was a deliberate choice.

The phrase “dark pattern” is …problematic. We really don’t need to be associating darkness with negativity any more than we already do in our language and culture.

This is something I discussed with Melissa Smith after her talk on this topic. The consensus in general seems to be that the terminology is far from ideal, but it’s a bit late to change it now (I’m sure if Harry were coining the term today, he would choose a different phrase).

The defining characteristic of a “dark” pattern is that intentionally deceptive. How about we shift the terminology to talk about deceptive patterns?

Now, I get that inertia is a powerful force and it would be confusing to try do to a find-and-replace on all the resources that already exist on documenting “dark” patterns. So here’s a compromise:

From here on out, let’s start using the adjective “deceptive” in addition to the existing adjective “dark.” That’s what I did in my blog post. I only used the phrase “deceptive dark patterns.”

If we do that consistently, then after a while we’ll be able to drop one of those adjectives—“dark”—and refer to “deceptive patterns.”

Personally I’d love it if we could change the terminology overnight—and I’m quite heartened by the speed at which we changed our Github branches from “master” to “main”—but being pragmatic, I think this approach stands a greater chance of success.

Who’s with me?