In June 2023, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon for deceiving users into using its Prime program via the use of “dark patterns”, and making them difficult to opt out.
As an avid Amazon user (not out of choice; certain items I needed in Australia were difficult to obtain without that service), I’ve been privy to Amazon pushing Prime into me with the pretense of “Free shipping!”, even as I chose items that could qualify for free shipping for items over $39. The bright blue button caught my eye as I tried to navigate out of the page that once again, pushes me to buy Prime. I click on “No Thanks” instead. I find myself, as a user, always having to navigate buttons with minimal decoration whenever a company tries to push a new service to me, or get my email from me; in fact, it happens so commonly that my brain’s been on autopilot.
I remembered a Facebook post from a university friend of mine years ago, who studied UX just as I did. They expressed that they were devastated and fearful that their dreams of designing for a better future were so often overshadowed by designers of giant corporations, who employed human psychology for their company’s benefits, often at the expense of ethics. They were younger than me, and have not graduated yet. All I could think about at the time was how things are only going to get worse from then on. In a way, I think I was right.
As much as I try to be hopeful about the future, I’m not very positive that the FTC will succeed in the lawsuit against Amazon. We all know that trying to get giant corporations like Amazon and Google to hold accountability is like trying to get a deadbeat parent to see their child. In addition, dark patterns are rampant everywhere, and there are no signs of stopping them anytime soon. Hidden costs, bait and switch, forced continuities of subscriptions are all examples of dark patterns that I’m sure we’re all privy to. As tech-savvy people, especially youths to middle-aged adults from ‘first-world’ countries, we’re more cautious, and we know how to sidestep from these tactics better. But what of people from states and countries who are less tech-savvy? They can be much more easily influenced by these tactics, and be taken advantage of and exploited. Considering that developing countries often are less tech-savvy compared to more developed countries, and how globalisation opens doors of the Internet to developing countries more and more, the existence of dark patterns could affect the livelihoods of people in developing countries even more.
Unfortunately, dark patterns are ultimately just a cog in the machine of survival in today’s Western-influenced world. Dark patterns are still a part of UI/UX, whether we like it or not; to employ User Experience is to employ human psychology to get what we want, whether good or bad. Hence, anyone who employs dark patterns are designers. Designers are only human; to be human is to be flawed. As much as we try to enforce how important it is for designers to embrace ethics in their design, design is still often a job for these people, and sometimes to put food on the table, dark patterns can be, to them, a necessity. Holding accountability to merely designers alone is to overlook the ever-present issue of our market-centric culture.
As a newly graduated tech person, sometimes I feel that I have no power; I only have my voice at my disposal. Over the years, I’ve hardened my heart and mind to numerous ethics violated by giant corporations with little to no accountability, especially on the UX side. So far, the only solution I can think of, is to continue enforcing and having conversations about ethics in design. As I am lucky enough to have the opportunity to work in a country with strong ethical laws and policies, rather than focus on the inevitability of more harm that corporations and dark patterns can cause, I hold hope for corporations that are against those practices and sought to design for the betterment of their consumers rather than just their stakeholders; I also hold hope that I will be able to contribute my skills for one. Even then, the issue still holds much more nuance than that. Perhaps I will have the chance to explore those nuances further into the future.
Thank you for reading.
Leave a Reply