User research into deceptive design patterns:
Despite our technological advancement and understanding of human nature, it’s still common to see deception in digital products. To understand digital deception (and better define it), we surveyed 536 people to measure and discuss people’s understanding of this matter.
Harry gave a speech at the Federal Trade Commission’s Dark Patterns workshop in April. Here’s the transcript, posted to Ev’s blog.
When I first worked on Dark Patterns in 2010, I was quite naive. I thought that they could be eradicated by shaming the companies that used them, and by encouraging designers to use a code of ethics.
The fact that we’re here today means that approach didn’t work.
Many, if not all, of our world’s most wicked problems are rooted in the excessive hiding of complexity behind illusions of simplicity—the relentless shielding of messy details in favor of easy-to-use interfaces.
But there’s always a tradeoff between complexity, truth, and control. The more details are hidden, the harder it is to understand how the system actually works. (And the harder it is to control). The map becomes less and less representative of the territory. We often trade completeness and control for simplicity. We’d rather have a map that’s easy to navigate than a map that shows us every single detail about the territory. We’d rather have a simple user interface than an infinitely flexible one that exposes a bunch of switches and settings. We don’t want to have to think too hard. We just want to get where we’re going.
Seamful and seamless design are reframed here as ethical and deceptive design:
Ethical design is like a glove. It obscures the underlying structure (i.e. your hand) but preserves some truth about its shape and how it works. Deceptive design is like a mitten. It obscures the underlying structure and also hides a lot about its shape and how it works.
Collusion between three separate services owned by the same company: the Google search engine, the YouTube website, and the Chrome web browser.
Gosh, this kind of information could be really damaging if there were, say, antitrust proceedings initiated.
In the meantime, use Firefox
Ethan shares my reaction to Google Duplex:
Frankly, this technology was designed to deceive humans.
And he points out that the team’s priorities are very revealing:
I’ll say this: it’s telling that matters of transparency, disclosure, and trust weren’t considered important for the initial release.
This is required reading for anyone planning to join in the Werewolf games at the next BarCamp.