Bad friends, have you ever been on the Internet?

Bad reviews are those that are legitimate because they are written but not noticed.

Let’s say you’re reading this normal line of text…

But it’s not obvious in this line

If you scan fast you might miss a line hidden above it.

This form of deception is called Dark Pattern Design.

To put it simply, websites and apps now study users’ habits and come up with a set of extremely insidious designs to trap them.

There are many kinds of designs.

For example, using visual design to induce users.

Take the ↓ button below

Here’s what Linkedin used to trick people into signing up:

Once you sign up with a Google account, Linkedin scans your address book and sends promotional emails to your friends if you click the more obvious button on the left, while the skip button on the right is less attractive.

Atlassian, for example, once you’ve typed in your account password, below the password bar, just above the login button, is a check box that sends an email subscription.

Most sites also place things in a less obvious font in this position, but what is it?

Keep the login option, forget the password option, or some privacy agreement that requires consent…

Which like the above so SAO put promotion options, a slip of the hand will be bombarded by spam.

There’s another kind of popover that we should be familiar with, that also uses dark design.

Guess which one is close popover?

Take another example of a domestic website. On the download page of some software resource sharing sites, you will see countless download buttons.

But if you look closely, you’ll find that it’s all the site’s own downloader link ↓

So where is the actual download link?

You have to swipe down to the bottom of the site, then again avoid some large, obvious, but incorrect download links to find…

In addition to visual design inducements,And psychological induction.

In the Internet age, all sites do everything they can to maintain user numbers, so they generally don’t want users to log out.

This way you can retain user data, and secondly it will look better when the statement says “we have XXX registered users”.

For example, how do I cancel my JINGdong account?

Ordinary people think it should be login account, and then open the account management page at the top of the site to look for it?

I’m sorry, but you won’t find it.

Because the cancellation of this function, and we think different, it seems not a user’s right to exercise, but a business to provide services.

So in the Help Center under customer Services.

And guess where?

In “self-service” in the picture above.

When you click on that page, you can finally find “account logout” in all services below.

Well, I found it…

At this time will jump out of a clause, need to meet some conditions to successfully cancel, after all, can not let some users hit the white note also cancel running right… But here’s an interesting one: all orders have been completed for more than a year.

After filling in, there is a manual review process.

But the terms and procedures of the poor comments I will not expand on, after all, today is mainly about the design.

The option to connect to an account has been taken out of the way and hidden away in a super hard to find place, which is a psycho-induced dark design: users get frustrated and don’t log out.

You may feel that bad reviews are a sign that you don’t have to use them. Why do you have to cancel them?

Because some people don’t want to leave their data where they’re not being served, who knows how personal information will be consumed

In fact, most websites and apps now have dark designs, and JD is not the only one.

Booking a train ticket, for example, will check some things by default.

Change to return insurance is not finished, submit the order, there will be a guy called “train ticket discount coupon” jumped out of the bushes to Gank you…

The original intention of this kind of design is that merchants want to maximize profits.

This can be hurtful to users, but sometimes it works, and there’s probably nothing wrong with being a big company, which is all about making money.

But overuse can backfire.

For example, last year’s high-profile alipay annual bill incident.

On the annual billing page at the time, users agreed to an obscure deal by default, causing a public relations crisis that officials later apologized for.

Or Microsoft used all sorts of magic tricks 2 years ago to force users to upgrade Windows 10…

Below the upgrade page, there is a big “OK” for agreement.

Some users have the cunning to know that this is a pit, and then reflexively click the obscure “upgrade Now” button and step on another pit…

The positive solution is the x in the upper right corner of the dot.

Even that was exploited by Microsoft…

In the image below, the two buttons are “upgrade now” and “upgrade tonight”, neither of which the user wants, so click “X”.

And then Microsoft said, is that a tacit acknowledgment that there’s a sense of “I’ve read it, I’m done”?

So I updated you, not treating you like a king at all…

A large number of users hated Windows 10 so much that they didn’t want to upgrade to the point where the system broke.

This is the legacy of overuse of dark design that hurts users.

This kind of design is universal, although the existence is reasonable, but reasonable does not necessarily mean that is right.

I think it’s time to be a little less predictable and a little more sincere.

Users are fine, routine upgrade to cheat users, but the final result will only hurt both sides.

photo

1. TechCrunch

2. Darkpatterns

3. CPCW

4. Microblog article “Remember a battle of wits and courage with small pop-ups”

5. Twitter @darkpatterns

7. Special Software Station

8. 9. 10. 11

13. My cell phone messages

14. 15. Parallel travel applets

16. ExtremeTech

The resources

1. WTF is Dark Pattern Design?

2. The New York Times “When Websites Won’t Take No for an Answer”

3. The Verge Dark Patterns: Inside The Interfaces Designed to Trick You

4. Darkpatterns.org

“I didn’t pay attention last weekend to buy more than 110 yuan of high-speed train tickets from 70 yuan…”