words about things

Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design

9-bits:

In particular, this passage does a fantastic job at articulating the hardest part of my job:

Removing dark patterns from any site involves a leap of faith. A company has to shift from a short-term quantitative measurement mindset to one that values relatively slow, steady growth of “warm fuzzy” qualitative things like brand image, credibility, and trust.

I wanted to agree with this article on ALA, but find it too naïve.  It tries to differentiate between “what’s good for business” and “what’s good for the user”, a false dilemma that only exists in systems where the parts are not functioning together.  Longer-term testing of this scenario would illustrate that users who felt deceived become net detractors, thus hurting business.  There is no one versus the other.  It is not a leap of faith at all, it is design strategy.