It's a gas station in Poland. This attempts to trick you into buying the overpriced 98 octane gasoline instead of the default 95 that everyone buys.
Notice that the 95 is hidden in the middle of the diesel fuel dispensers and even its nozzle is designed to match those. The photo doesn't show it well but the actual labels are placed high enough so that you won't spot them unless you deliberately look up.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by dsl on Thursday February 12, 2015 @08:27AM
(#9038665)
But if a startup does something similar like highlighting the most expensive option on a subscription page, it is called growth hacking and we applaud the CEO and designers.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by Mahn on Thursday February 12, 2015 @09:12AM
(#9038813)
Everything is relative. If you define "evil pattern" as a design that encourages a certain action that you (the makers/owners) want the user to do for your own benefit, then practically every single sign up form or landing page is an evil pattern too. Heck, almost every form of marketing could be considered an evil pattern by that definition as well.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by TeMPOraL on Thursday February 12, 2015 @09:17AM
(#9038833)
I'd suggest a better definition - "evil pattern" is "a design that encourages a certain action that you (the makers/owners) want the user to do, which provides negative value for said user relative to alternatives".
Your job as an entrepreneur should be to steer your users toward options that are optimal for him/her and charge accordingly. Trying to trick your user into choosing something worse for him so that you can profit more is just dickish, period.
> almost every form of marketing could be considered an evil pattern by that definition as well
Because it often is, and it's bewildering how people are used to it - to the point they turned cheating and abuse into a legitimate occupation.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by expertentipp on Thursday February 12, 2015 @04:29AM
(#9038086)
Good catch. It's a pain to decrypt the branding of gas types, they differ from retailer to retailer plus nasty tricks like this. Once you get it right and go to the cashier - "Perhaps chocolate bar? coke? hot dog?" Just let me pay goddammit! Even buying gas is frustrating in Poland!
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by praptak on Thursday February 12, 2015 @04:55AM
(#9038145)
Yeah, this is also annoying. But the nozzle thing is another class of dickery - they are messing here with a convention established to prevent people from mistaking fuel type.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by Tepix on Thursday February 12, 2015 @03:09AM
(#9037925)
A dark pattern that even well-liked websites like SPIEGEL and heise.de use is image galleries with wrong image counts. The gallery claims there are X pictures, yet there are only X-1 and the final one is an advert.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by junto on Thursday February 12, 2015 @05:04AM
(#9038168)
I noticed the other day, that if you use the Ryanair booking system in German, you get a much clearer "Keine Versicherung erforderlich" (No Insurance Required) option, right at the top.
Btw. In most of apps user interfaces and usability is just so bad, that you don't need any dark patterns to completely ruin experience and frustrate users. Making something purely random and without any logic, isn't 'carefully crated', but it does exactly the same.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by iQuercus on Thursday February 12, 2015 @09:04AM
(#9038777)
I'd be leery of assigning "dark" and "light" intrinsic villainy or heroism to patterns like opt-in vs. opt-out. Yes, a tick normally should mean yes, but context matters. For example, look at the opt-in/opt-out debate in organ donation. The evidence suggests that opt-out forms significantly increase rates of deceased organ donation.
As long as the form is clear about what the tick means and an opt-out set up increases positive behavior that benefits fellow man and society, is it really such a clear-cut bad thing? Is the pattern evil, or the outcomes?
Also if you're interested in the opt-in/opt-out debate, here's an interesting discussion of some of its nuances:
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by TeMPOraL on Thursday February 12, 2015 @09:12AM
(#9038819)
I agree. Opt-out itself is not wrong, what matters are your intentions and the consequences. Some things really do have to be opt-out - like organ donation you mentioned or other things that are beneficial to individual or to the society at no expense to the individual. But the "dark pattern" starts when you're exploiting individuals via opt-out.
I think issue is quite simple - if you're exploiting people for your own gain, it's dickish. A lot of the discussion, and generally sales, marketing and PR, is just people trying to excuse doing things they know are wrong, so that they don't feel bad about themselves.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by harrybr on Thursday February 12, 2015 @09:32AM
(#9038897)
This article doesn't argue that opt in / opt out has "intrinsic villainy or heroism". Other than that, you're absolutely right – it's all about the context in which the UI is applied.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by cpeterso on Wednesday February 11, 2015 @10:24PM
(#9037202)
The name "dark pattern" is a bit too clever. There ought be a more straightforward term for something this important to become mainstream (like "spam" or "phishing" have).
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by awjr on Thursday February 12, 2015 @11:54AM
(#9039763)
Have to agree on Experts Exchange. I used them quite extensively, they moved to being quite aggressive at hiding their answers, so I got to the point where I asked Google to remove them from any search results. Then stackexchange made it all better.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by Netminder_EE on Friday February 13, 2015 @07:32PM
(#9048128)
What's annoyingly fraudulent is posting this as if it were something new.
The article was written in August 2013, and used information from early that year. For one thing, Experts Exchange has used neither that system since before the article came out (meaning it's bad research to begin with).
But if you all want to drink the Kool-Aid, be my guests.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by aaronbrethorst on Thursday February 12, 2015 @02:03AM
(#9037793)
Given that Apple rendered MAC addresses useless for tracking users in iOS 8, and make developers swear up and down that they're only going to use IDFA for advertising, I think they're a bad example to start with.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by roel_v on Thursday February 12, 2015 @04:43AM
(#9038116)
Oh, so to stop location tracking, not identification by app developers? I interpreted the GP as meaning that apps somehow couldn't use the mac for id purposes. Thanks.
Re:Dark Patterns: Inside the interfaces designed to trick you
by maxjg on Thursday February 12, 2015 @06:51AM
(#9038404)
Both are correct (unrelated). MAC address is randomized when scanning for wifi networks, and if you ask iOS for the device MAC address, the SDK will return a fake MAC.
It's a gas station in Poland. This attempts to trick you into buying the overpriced 98 octane gasoline instead of the default 95 that everyone buys.
Notice that the 95 is hidden in the middle of the diesel fuel dispensers and even its nozzle is designed to match those. The photo doesn't show it well but the actual labels are placed high enough so that you won't spot them unless you deliberately look up.
Your job as an entrepreneur should be to steer your users toward options that are optimal for him/her and charge accordingly. Trying to trick your user into choosing something worse for him so that you can profit more is just dickish, period.
> almost every form of marketing could be considered an evil pattern by that definition as well
Because it often is, and it's bewildering how people are used to it - to the point they turned cheating and abuse into a legitimate occupation.
Who is this "we" you talk about? Any time I hear "growth hacking", I reinterpret to "whitewashed term for scummy SEO and/or spam."
Its mandatory field is a list like this :
"Which is your country of origin ?
Austria
Belgium
Croatia
Denmark
France
I don't want insurance
Italy
Sweden
Ungary"
Priceless.
http://i.imgur.com/99pIygi.png
It appears that they don't use this dark pattern on German speakers.
Dark patterns like this are now illegal by European Law. [1]
[1] http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/08/26/some-dark-pa...
Btw. In most of apps user interfaces and usability is just so bad, that you don't need any dark patterns to completely ruin experience and frustrate users. Making something purely random and without any logic, isn't 'carefully crated', but it does exactly the same.
As long as the form is clear about what the tick means and an opt-out set up increases positive behavior that benefits fellow man and society, is it really such a clear-cut bad thing? Is the pattern evil, or the outcomes?
Also if you're interested in the opt-in/opt-out debate, here's an interesting discussion of some of its nuances:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/biome/opt-in-or-opt-out-informi...
I think issue is quite simple - if you're exploiting people for your own gain, it's dickish. A lot of the discussion, and generally sales, marketing and PR, is just people trying to excuse doing things they know are wrong, so that they don't feel bad about themselves.
What a surprise to see the "?share=1" people in an article on dark patterns. I don't understand how that site exists.
The article was written in August 2013, and used information from early that year. For one thing, Experts Exchange has used neither that system since before the article came out (meaning it's bad research to begin with).
But if you all want to drink the Kool-Aid, be my guests.
How does that work?
It was the first source I know of that started a compilation of these.