Dark patterns

Dark patterns are carefully designed interfaces and interactions with the sole purpose of manipulating or tricking the user into performing unintended actions or even entangling them into malicious results. After such a definition, you may think that such actions belong to the deepest shady corners of the internet. Sadly, even mainstream companies often follow these unethical practices. As a matter of fact, the reproduced examples in these sections all belong to such a category, and as often happens with design patterns, many of these overlaps or can be found nested within each other. Let’s see them one by one.

Trick questions

This pattern is a simple or complex play on words to trick the user to do the opposite of what their intention is. Here is an example:

Figure 11.27 – A trick question for a newsletter subscription

As you can see in this example, a user filling in a form would be tempted to leave this checkbox unchecked...