Seven ways websites trick us to buy

Dark patterns use interface design to coerce, steer or deceive users into making decisions that benefit the site but not necessarily the user

Researchers have warned that so-called ‘dark patterns' in web and interface design in becoming increasingly common and potentially more dangerous.

Dark patterns are user interfaces features designed to trick users into decisions they would not otherwise make.

In a draft paper entitled Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites, six researchers from Princeton University and one from the University of Chicago describe dark patterns as "user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making decisions that, if fully informed and capable of selecting alternatives, they might not make".

They analysed around 53,000 product pages from approximately 11,000 shopping websites chosen in the order they were ranked by Amazon's Alexa Service. The researchers then categorised potentially harmful dark patterns into seven main types.

• Sneaking: Attempting to misrepresent user actions, or delay information that if made available to users, they would likely object to.
• Urgency: Imposing a deadline on a sale or deal, thereby accelerating user decision-making and purchases.
• Misdirection: Using visuals, language, or emotion to steer users toward or away from making a particular choice.
• Social proof: Influencing users' behaviour by describing the experiences and behaviour of other users.
• Scarcity: Signalling that a product is likely to become unavailable, thereby increasing its desirability to users.
• Obstruction: Making it easy for the user to get into one situation but hard to get out of it.
• Forced action: Forcing the user to do something tangential in order to complete their task.

The researchers found that sites ranked higher by Alexa were more likely to feature dark patterns. They discovered a total of 1,841 instances of dark patterns, which were present on 1,267 of the 11,000 shopping websites, around 11.2 per cent of the data set.

While not all dark patterns are illegal "they are nonetheless problematic because they are intended to prey on our cognitive limitations and weaknesses," said Princeton Professor Arvind Narayanan, one of the researchers.

However, some of the dark patterns certainly are illegal. The researchers uncovered 22 different third-party entities including Beeketing, Dynamic Yield, Yieldify and Fomo that enable the creation of Social proof dark patterns through plugins and add-ons and which frequently use underhand methods.

"Some of these entities promote blatantly deceptive practices and provide the infrastructure for retailers to use these practices to affect consumer behaviours for profit. These practices are unambiguously unlawful in the United States (under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and similar state laws), the European Union (under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and similar member state laws), and numerous other jurisdictions," the paper says.