The Dark Side of Popular Apps
Apps love people — more specifically, their time. To apps, not spending more time on them, or really all of your time, is a tragedy, but acceptable. However, deleting an account or unsubscribing to a service, well that’s just a crime, at least in their eyes.
Take, for example, The New York Times — one of the biggest media production companies in the world. Signing up for an account takes as long as 5 minutes, but the same can’t be said for canceling a subscription.
To even find out how to cancel, is a chore. Let’s run through the process -
To start, you have to scroll to the bottom of a long NYT page, to the tiny text section that says “Help”.
Next, thankfully, the cancel your subscription link is somewhat easy to find.
Just to be brought to a page telling you there’s no way you, the customer, can cancel your account. You have to reach out to a customer care rep or use a chat line which 95% of the time (in my experience) is busy.
I don’t know how this kind of practice isn’t predatory. The amount of hoops a user has to jump through just to find out that they can’t cancel a subscription themselves is anti-consumer practices.
This kind of account cancelation system is found everyone, and only benefits the business, not the consumer. To a business this system of account cancellation tests well if your measuring the amount of accounts that aren’t cancelled. However, it creates a false positive — the lack of account cancelation is directly related to bad and manipulative UX design. If anything, tests like this should show that this design, in fact, does not work in the consumers favor, but I think that’s the point.
However, there are some bigger names that make managing subscriptions easier, surprisingly Apple is one of those companies. Just take a look at how you can manage multiple subscriptions on a single page —
This is an example of pro-consumer practices — meaning that this was built with the user of the user, not the business in mind. This is the kind of design and user experience we should be opting for. It may decrease sales for a business, but it builds trust.
Another example of some really shady (but not illegal for some reason) design is from The New Yorker, another reputable media outlet. Take a quick glance at this data opt-out slider-
A typical user may see that slides as an on-off button, so naturally, at a glance, the user would keep it on. But if you look at the small, bolded text at the bottom, the copy reads that the button needs to be to the left to not sell your data. It’s again, predatory practices that preys on the users initial assumption that the button being on means data isn’t being sold.
A final example of a dark pattern, which isn’t exactly horrible, just annoying, is from everyone’s favorite, design totally not ethically and morally questionable app, Instagram. This app loves pushing this pop-up for certain users —
Basically, this pop up comes up quite a few times per user sessions, basically nagging the user to turn up pop up notifications. Apparently, a user can’t say no once and Instagram to be cool with that, it’s really gotta hammer the point home.
It’s design like this that motivates me to be a designer, and an ethical one at that. It is every designers duty to consider the needs of an end user, not how to exploit them. I’d say people who design otherwise do not meet the basic requirements of a designer, and should not carry the title like so.