Dark Patterns: How Good UX Can Be Bad UX

[Music] good afternoon everyone right let's get it started hi um welcome to my session for uh the ux summit um as you can see on the title slide it's called Dark patterns how good ux can be bad ux yay um I'm actually really nervous because this is my first time speaking um to such a large audience um so please bear with me right so let's start hello right so my name is Ana sanusi and I'm actually from Malaysia and I came to the UK 8 years ago to study and 6 years ago I started my career as a 2d animator

in a local um Animation studio so we did uh Children's shows uh explainer videos and things like that and I studied animation by the way so I wanted to do animation uh but I needed a visa to stay in the UK so the only other company hiring was actually a video games company and they needed a 2d artist so just like that I changed Chang into a TD artist um it was funny because they had a um art test that I had to learn a completely new program in one night and managed to do it um and the lady who hired me thought I was lying when I told her I learned everything in one night so the mor of that story is fake it till you make it that's how I got here so anyway that was great and um it was in

that video games company that I learned what the world of UI is I didn't even know that it existed um in uni all I knew was there was 3D artists there was animators there was producers things like that but UI was completely um new and unknown to me so I kind of had to learn from scratch what it was um besides like nobody really pays attention to uh menu screens I mean it's a good sign that it's a good menu screen cuz you didn't notice it but you know um right so for the last 6 years four years yeah four years in a games industry I have been lucky enough to be able to work on a huge amount of different platforms when is a huge I mean four so there um I didn't work on PC consoles uh handheld and mobile um I was very lucky that the company that I worked for um was very ambitious and um adventurous in the the platforms that we went for so um I got

kind of I got a finger in different pies all the time so it was fun and slowly from there I learned what ux is and from then on my life changed suddenly you learned like um it's not just boxes it's not just menus It's actually an experience that's what they said but so that's a little bit about me just in case you're wondering why am I talking about dark patterns um before I start talking about dark patterns though um the topic will be calling out certain uh techniques or uh practices that's not really the best thing for you to do and I really do not want to name names so things like game titles or company names I'll try my best not to mention anything or anyone because in the spirit of good

sportsmanship we're supposed to lift each other up and support each other so calling out another company or anything like that is a big no no for me so because of that anything I show will not be shown does that make sense anyway so all right let's get started what is a dark pattern and I don't have music so I have to make my own music so luckily um in 2013 a bunch of very smart academics looked into dark patterns uh in the design of games and they finally came to a conclusion or rather a uh a definition of what dark patterns is so a dark pattern is a pattern used intentionally by a game creator to cause negative experiences for players which are against their best interest and likely to happen without their consent

woo that's a really long thing um when I found out about dark patterns uh it was not too long ago and it was in a website called dark pns.org and it was conceived by this dude called Harry brickel um he's a London designer and he noticed a few things that is a little bit iffy especially with uh websites and forms and um where you buy things commercial websites mostly so these are things like when you check out something and then they automatically add an extra item to your bag and you don't know that you're buying something until the very last moment you're about to pay so that's a little bit that's not great is it you feel a bit duped um other things are like uh this one that annoyed me was if you're on a mailing list and by law you do have uh an un subscribe button link right at the

bottom and some companies will have the link provided but then they'll make the font um the same sorry not font this the color the same as the background so you can't see it unless you actually highlight the sentence so it's things like that that is really skey and not really nice to be honest so those things are dark patterns and what I want to talk about is dark patterns in video games specific specifically so these academics when they talked about dark patterns it's mostly about game design and obviously where in the ux summit so we're going to talk about the ux of dark patterns um right so with dark patterns I need to go into uh what you call good ux so good ux what is good ux

and it's a very vague term so I guess um from a technique point of view good youx could mean oh the technique is perfect you've got your psychological principles and your behavioral techniques that you apply to your um interface to get uh to reach your goals so let's say your intended goal is monetization and user retention and this is actually pretty much what all games try to get and it's been proven uh recently the global games software Market uh Revenue in December 2016 increased by 10% to a record 7.6 billion that's billion with a B so that's loads of money so clearly good ux is a huge contributor to people spending money and uh staying playing the games on and on and on but I wouldn't say this is sec I would actually say it's effective ux because good could mean

ethically good and sometimes some of these things aren't actually ethically good but they are effective so what about bad U so what would you call bad U I would say a user experience should cover all aspects of the person's experience with the system including design uh Graphics interface physical interaction tutorials and all that so if if you're going through uh a game and it pisses you off that's pretty much bad ux to me so if a player feels cheated or dissatisfied from an experience with a game that's considered bad ux and usually that results in a negative perception of the game um a negative perception of the developers and from that a negative perception of the industry as a whole um this is actually quite prominent recently with the rise of free to-play

games especially uh in the App Store and such people do get pissed off and they think everyone's just a Manny grab when clearly that's not true so in 2014 uh there was a study that mentioned out of 10 million players 19% of those uh only played a game once or open the game once and 2/3 stopped playing after the first 24 hours and about half of spending happened in the first seven days so I'm not saying that this is the entire reason but it badx is a contributing reason to a retention drop and I think a bad ux is a result of exploitative ux but the thing is I know thinking it makes money

so why not because I guess as developers that's what we trying to do right we're just going to take money well actually it's about ethics I'm really glad some of you laugh because that was a very Insight joke the internet's going to get me later so anyway right so the goal of ux design is um according to Oxford is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility ease of use and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product I do believe as uh ux practitioners though we do have an ethical obligation um doc patterns are ultimately a cynical yet working method for developers to make quick cash it's a short-term solution to a financial problem that yields little to no trust from your

player base if developers wish to cultivate a loyal long-term and meaningful relationship with their customers then it has to consider good and open practices the user experience is front and center to that idea it is my belief that through design we can demonstrate to our audience how we feel about them use of dark patterns is a monument to our lack of respect for that audience and only through thoughtful design and sensible choices can we win it back so really we do hold quite a lot of power in how we persuade users to use our games and how they act with our product so with that we do have a moral responsibility we really should not treat players as a source of Revenue a

person has the right to be treated as having intrinsic worth players aren't there for us to use as source of Revenue they're not tools to create money they are individuals with their own objectives of buying your product like escapism or having fun we can pursue our own goals but still respect players desires and of course it takes everyone to uphold such ethic uh because if we let others slide then it becomes normal and I don't think I want to be in a place where scheming people off of their money is a normal thing so enough of that should we look at actually like a few dark pattern examples so um as I mentioned before I can't really show actual uh screen caps so these are very simplified uh

Recreation as you can I guess you can call them that I made it in the PowerPoint so please brace yourself for amazing squares [Music] Tada okay so this one's called the bait and switch so the bait and switch is basically when for example there's a video ad playing automatically of course cuz they're annoying and you just want to close them so you wait for the little x button to appear and then you see it and then you press it and then instead of the video ad closing it goes straight to the purchasing screen and you're like are you serious really really I just wanted yeah and then this happened to me and I wanted to throw my phone out the window I was like why would you do this so that's just basically made me want to delete the app instantly so I have no idea why the developers decided to do this is it because they think accidentally clicking onto the uh shop page would make me buy

it or something if anything is just annoying so delete the apps and don't do that that's what I say next one is a misuse of graphic design this one's pretty obvious because you you see this literally everywhere if you go to a web page where you're trying to download something you find like 50 download buttons and a teeny tiny link of the actual download link um same with app why why just why can you even see the cancel button see why I did that I made it really subtle and it shouldn't be subtle so sometimes uh people rapid fire clicking through things like next next next next and then the next thing you know you're clicking buy and you're like what what did I do so it's things like that where you're taking control away from the users that is considered bad practice CU you're basically checking them into buying your things rather than just letting them want to buy your things

this one's my favorite demoralizing terminology yeah um as ux or UI designers we kind of we we think about the words that we use really carefully to make sure that the players understand what trying to say but then some people just decide to get really funny about things and did it you know okay this one I made it up give up loser but um I'm pretty sure there's other games who that kind of demoralizes the player kind of belittles them for whatever reason and you're playing a game and the game's being snarky at you well the UI is being snaky at you not even the game that's even worse you're being um yeah some kind of some menu is pissing you off so these kind of things contribute to an overall bad experience so therefore ooh bad ux next one is called uh daily quote unquote rewards so this

is where just as you're about to leave an app they will say oh you should log in tomorrow and you might get this thing it's like a 0.003% chance of getting it so you should totally try and then you you log in every day hoping to get that one amazing item and you just don't that's just that's basically dangling a carrot in front of your players and hope like making them come back for more when it's the chances are really low I mean daily login bonuses is not a bad thing but when you promise something with such a low chance of reward it's it's almost like you're giving them false hope I sound like a scorned lover I'm sorry all right next one guilt tripping notifications oh this one I really really hate these um this is why every time I download a new app or a new game I instantly um deny any

notifications because you get stuff like this we like that's the voice I'm imagining the notification to sound like you're dying why you can you come back I was like oh my God shut up yeah I'm literally saying shut up to my own notifications so I know that they're supposed to remind you that the game is still going on and and they're supposed to entice you to come back but they're being whiny about like and they're basically making you feel bad for leaving them that's almost as bad as those again email subscriptions that you unsubscribe from and then you go to the website and then there's like a sad little owl was like oh I'm going to die now cuz you unsubscribed like really yeah so things like that like it's completely unnecessary to add grievances so the next one is social validation and compliance this one uh is basically using your your own friends to peer

pressure you into playing your game so the element of having friends um playing the same games does actually um make you come back to a game more often there's a study F this I can't reite it right now cuz I forgot but the one thing that shouldn't happen is when you're pushing it so much when that person your friend probably doesn't even care like they're kind of using they're using people you know to Coke you into into getting uh into going back into the game and um I think I just personally don't really like that right so there are some ways of doing things like monetization isn't evil Ina purchases is not evil obviously but there are ways to do it better and not so um annoying I

guess so this one's a good one which is called clear trade-offs so these are two different um examples but basically you are giving choice to the player they know exactly what's happening and they have a choice and you are giving them control over what they want to do do you want them if your game is good enough and they're enjoying it they probably wouldn't mind watching that 30 second ad without you pushing it to them I mean I'm pretty I've done it myself I know a lot of other people have and the fact that they actually let me say nope I really don't want to watch this right now I just want to continue playing something else the same with um a pay wall where you buy once and that's it no more ads forever so that's also one of my favorites because you know what if your game is so good I don't want ad I will give you the money just don't bombard me with things again this is about giving the player

control next one is balance UI design so um as you know most uh in our purchases uh menus do have multiple choices where you know from the lowest to the highest what gets me what really Ruffles my feathers is when they automatically highlight the most expensive choice and make them animate or something and it's like $99 or something insane like that and children have been known to buy these things because they have zero concept of um in app gem real world values I'm not using the right terms but I think you know what I'm saying the good thing about that is that um that phenomenon has been curbed with actual laws like you know what Amazon or apple those platforms have been sued because they made it too easy for children to uh buy these things without any parental supervision

so from a ux perspective we we could have curbed that a little bit I mean just to make sure everything's balanced and to not prey on accidental purchases basically and the next one is definitive and clear language so uh again this one players tend to have a mental model of what they expect the you why to say or what the game does and if your game or menu basically is very clear and very distinct about what's happening they are less likely to be confused they are less likely to be frustrated and therefore they are less likely to have a bad experience so as long as everything's clear because I'm pretty sure there has been games where they modle up words they use words that might sound like yes might sound like no but not quite and just like why is that and you don't

understand and you kind of just click it anyway and you end up somewhere you don't want to be so therefore you get frustrated so things like that is easily um rectified with just clear language this one is rewarding loyalty um I play a certain free-to-play game that goes up to the thousands of levels and I think I'm one of those losers that continue I've played this game for four years straight basically and um at one point I was so addicted to this game that I installed um the game to my sister's phone or my brother's iPad you know so I have like three devices on the go what I did notice was that on my account because I've gone up to like level a thousand I barely saw any ads or any intrusive anything it was really easy to play and I was just continuously paying it but when I played on my sister's phone or something uh

there will be ads popping up a bit more you know and to be honest these kind of ads are a a bit of a uh necessary evil I guess with free toplay games but the fact that they never show up on my account because I'm level 1,000 something is kind of nice they're kind of rewarding me for being a loyal customer and I've had such a good time with them that I've actually I have spent money and I don't feel at all bad I wish I could name this game because it it actually has good ux um it's one of the few freet to-play games that does it well right so what does this mean for us so if you're a UI or ux designer you should discuss the ma the matter of Ethics or rather the lack of a code of ethics because the lack of code of ethics is kind of the reason why people get away with all these things um a lot of uh a lot the reason why these

practices are so common is because the company they set their values more on getting monetization or getting squeezing out the final Penny from quote unquote wh whale users I really don't like that term but it's true and sometimes you kind of have to stand your ground I know it's difficult like I think I've been there where I feel like I don't really want to do this but you kind of have to follow all this but sometimes if you if you state your Cas strong enough and kind of stand together maybe I'm being a bit romantic about this I don't know the power of friendship yay um hopefully uh it will become less common place so you have to ask yourself as a ux designer though what you designed does it manipulate players or does it Aid them and let them feel secure about

their knowledge and decisions people don't like feeling out of control and as ux designers we do persuade players to do certain things but persuading shouldn't be manipulating and of course uh there's always ways to design for the mutual benefit of players and the game video games is still a business um but that doesn't mean you should exploit people for the sake of uh monetary gain and if you're a company it would be great if you could ensure the ux conveys company values um if you remember what I said earlier uh you have a bad experience you think badly of the game and you start B thinking badly of that company and soon people are just like God video games all they do is waste your money and waste your time when in fact that's not true I'm pretty sure

everybody in this room knows that's not true so it'd be great if companies could uh facilitate an environment that allows for the refusal of unethical requests sometimes things happen and sometimes people are like wait this this gets money cuz that's metric you know metric shows that it works sure it does work but at what cost it it feels a little bit like selling your soul to the devil but um different companies have different priorities and there has been people who has left certain companies because they don't agree with the company policies I'm not saying you should quit your jobs or anything but you know you are who you work with and finally use metrics to increase player enjoyment and not as a tool of manipulation I'm pretty sure you can see by now that I use the word manipulation quite a lot in this um it's a really fine line between aiding a the player to do what you want or persuading them or just guiding them and literally

manipulating them to do things that they don't want to do so as ux designers we do have quite a lot of power and with that much power we have quite a bit of responsibility so finally I just want to end my talk with a quote that can you guys guess who this is from anybody go on yeah sator water business card I'm a corporate president in my mind I am a game developer but in my heart I am a gamer and that Rings true for most of us I think no matter what we are on our business cards we are still Gamers so therefore we know what it's like to be on the other side why would we want to manipulate them when we are them and this one is can anybody guess this one it's actually me I want to do this posst

yay and probably you guys too I mean that's my point we're all Gamers at heart and we're all game developers we do this because we love it and I'm pretty sure all of you remember your first games and you growing you grew up thinking oh man I want to make that I want to make uh games that people enjoy and could remember by and I'm I just want you to remember that when you go to work when you make games remember why you got into the industry and the the first place you know it's not to manipulate people it's not to get it's not a cash grab it's literally an art and you have to remember why he got there in the first place so thank you very much and I hope you you ex responsibly