Have you noticed the growing body of legislation and regulation intended to prevent businesses designing tricksy, manipulative interfaces?

Deceptive patterns are design elements intended to manipulate us into doing things we don’t want to do.

They used to be referred to as ‘dark patterns’ but many people are now uncomfortable with that term.

How do they manipulate us? Well, for example, they might trick us into:

  • Visiting a page we don’t want to go to.
  • Viewing videos (usually adverts) we don’t want to watch.
  • Choosing a more expensive package than we need.
  • Subscribing when we just want a one-off purchase.
  • Forgetting to cancel a free trial subscription.

They do this in various ways, from making ‘cancel’ buttons small with low contrast, to using artificial countdowns to panic us into buying.

“Some of the main types of deceptive pattern are confirm shaming, the decoy effect, the ‘roach motel’ and false urgency,” says my colleague Ella Welsby, who is an expert on the subject. “Confirm shaming, for example, is about guilting a user into opting into something, usually by wording the option to decline so it makes them feel ashamed or embarrassed.”

My own favourite example of a deceptive pattern is a news website that auto-played advertisements unless you clicked a tiny text-only cancel button. But as the page loaded, slowly, elements on the page would jump around, making it almost impossible to click the link before the video started playing.

Nobody likes deceptive patterns

Nobody likes these techniques, except those with short-term sales targets to meet.

If you’re a consumer, they’re infuriating, and make you feel irritation towards the brands that use them.

And if you’re a designer – especially one who has been trained to put the user’s needs first – you probably feel lousy employing them.

“I learned a lot about deceptive patterns working in the travel industry,” says Helio Costa, SPARCK’s Product Design Lead. “I created some design patterns that, with hindsight, I don’t feel good about. In my opinion, user experience ends when profit and monetisation take priority.”

Antonio Labbate, one of my content design colleagues, has a similar view:

“In my past life in e-commerce there were many discussions about where to draw the line when it came to employing deceptive patterns. It’s a sector where revenue and profits are generally more important to senior stakeholders than user experience, so it can be a hard conversation for in-house designers to have. We’re often towards the bottom of the corporate ladder. I don’t personally think I ever crossed the line in anything I worked on but it was sometimes a struggle to stay on the right side.”

Low-hanging fruit for politicians and regulators

When Harry Brignull first wrote about deceptive patterns back in 2010, and dedicated a website to cataloguing them, it felt as if a curtain had been pulled back.

Perhaps we were all a little innocent back then. I certainly remember encountering deceptive patterns but thinking, “Huh, weird that they’ve made this silly mistake – guess they’re bad designers!”

But, no, they were fiendishly good designers, using their powers for evil. (OK, maybe that’s a little melodramatic.)

In the years that followed, one article after another appeared. Tech geeks learned about deceptive patterns, then savvy consumers, then, eventually, politicians and regulators heard about them too.

Politicians in search of ‘announceables’ – policies they can reveal with a flourish – are often drawn to things like this.

It’s a chance to stand up for consumers, to be seen holding global tech giants to account, without incurring substantial public expenditure.

Anti-deceptive pattern legislation in the US

In October 2021 the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) put out a policy statement warning businesses not to use deceptive patterns to “trap or trick consumers into subscription services”.

Since then, it has brought cases against various organisations including:

The UK comes after deceptive patterns

In December 2021 the UK Financial Conduct Authority started work on what would eventually become its Consumer Duty. That comes into effect this month, July 2023, and obliges banks and finance businesses to:

"...communicate and engage with customers so that they can make effective, timely and properly informed decisions about financial products and services and can take responsibility for their actions and decisions… [and] not seek to exploit customers’ behavioural biases, lack of knowledge or characteristics of vulnerability."

In other words, they are expected to explain things clearly, present all the options, and resist temptation to nudge consumers towards commercially favourable options.

In February 2022, the Competition and Marketing Authority (CMA) launched it Rip-Off Tip-Off website where consumers are encouraged to report “sneaky online sales tactics”.

In April the same year it published a discussion paper called Online Choice Architecture to encourage a debate around deceptive patterns and consumer choice.

Then, in November last year, it launched an investigation into mattress firm Emma Sleep and the suggestion that it “misled consumers by using countdown timers and claims about time limits to imply that a discounted price will end soon, when this may not be the case”.

In April this year, the UK Government announced plans to ban subscription traps through new legislation. Disney+ is one organisation that has spoken out against the proposed Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill, suggesting to me that it feels reliant on deceptive patterns to gain and keep subscribers.

Deceptive patterns in the EU

Meanwhile, the European Union has been putting together its own legislation in the form of the EU Digital Services Act.

It came into effect in November 2022 and includes this statement:

“Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions.”

That’s alongside existing bodies of legislation which already address related issues, such as GDPR.

In January this year the EU’s Consumer Protection Cooperation Network conducted a screening of 399 retail websites. It focused on fake countdown timers, interfaces designed to push consumers towards certain choices, and hidden information. It found that 148 sites (almost 40%) contained at least one of those patterns which, in the word of EU Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders, “rely on manipulative practices to exploit consumers' vulnerabilities or trick them”.

Motivation to put the user first

As a user-centred content designer, I suspect this wave of regulation and legislation will be helpful in convincing stakeholders to do the right thing.

Research can tell us what users want and/or need.

Experience tells us that the best way to achieve customer satisfaction, and to win their loyalty, is with straightforward journeys that get them where they want to be with close-to-zero frustration.

Increasingly, the law will be on our side in those debates, too.

And artefacts from the design process will be vital evidence that users really were put first at every stage in the process.

Do your products and services need a clean-up?

SPARCK specialises in user-centred design and can help get your applications and websites in shape for the post-deceptive-patterns world.

We can provide plug-and-play design teams including whatever mix of strategists, researchers, content designers, product designers and service designers you might need.

Talk to my colleague Terry Dixon to explore the options, or just for a chat about ethical design.

Written by Ray Newman - Content Designer