90 Percent of Everything

Acting shady hurts your brand. Harry Brignull(the author) discusses this in a talk[1] that I found on the dark patterns website(I checked out the website after loving the article). He makes the argument that sure, many of these tactics might increase your conversion rates or make you some money, at least in the short run. But it also causes you to come off as seedy, to come off as a back alley discount store instead of as a premium brand. He points out that if you're doing this and you're aware of that and you're ok with it, that's one thing. But plenty of sites might not have realized what they're doing and how it comes off. I know I personally resent it when sites leave boxes like "sign up for our newsletter" checked or when they have fake download box adds. Making it hard for me to do what I want to do, no matter how you do it, bothers me. It feels like you're the adversary of the site, not a customer or friend. I believe he talks about it around 12 minutes in but the entire presentation is easily worth watching. He has another one aimed at designers that I plan on watching as soon as I find my headphones(the sound is too low for me to hear it on my MBP). http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/12/17/dark-patterns-an-overv…

It's quite common for UIs to introduce fake latency on purpose so that users trust the application more. When it goes too fast, users don't trust it, so a benevolent deception is introduced. https://www.fastcompany.com/3061519/the-ux-secret-that-will-ruin-apps-… http://www.cond.org/deception.pdf https://90percentofeverything.com/2010/12/16/adding-delays-to-increase…

That sort of thing is now illegal in the UK and most likely in Germany too. The trouble is that there are no penalties beyond individual refunds and not enough people are aware of their rights for it to have a significant impact. See: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/08/26/some-dark-patterns-now… Note that this article is from two years ago and at least one of the sites called out is still doing the same thing.

> It appears that they don't use this dark pattern on German speakers. Dark patterns like this are now illegal by European Law. [1] [1] http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2014/08/26/some-dark-patterns-now…

Yeah my first thought was this. Definitely remembering it from an article of the same author about the new UK directive http://www.90percentofeverything.com/category/dark-patterns/

I hit this on HN a couple of years ago: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/12/16/adding-delays-to-incre… I also wrote about it. It's real. Many customers are not happy if you make it seem too easy.

I agree with your sentiment about sprawl being toxic, but I think that time and population migration will solve the problem via urban renewal. The suburbs seem to be (If you believe the Brookings institute) on the wane as families grow smaller and can be accommodated into the tighter spaces of a city. Few of my friends have moved outwards as they've had children, and even then it tends to be those who grew up on farms, and moved to cities for technical jobs. Brookings report: http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/05/28-city-growth-frey Related, an excerpt from Hustwit's Urbanized talking about the same issue in Brasilia: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/11/05/brazillia-an-excerpt-f…

This is not unique to EA. It's a well-known pattern: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/05/21/manipulating-app-store…

This post reminds me of this one: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/07/23/the-slippery-slope/ Where they talk about how hard it is to disable iOS ad tracking.

Definitely falls into the 'dark pattern' category as well. http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/07/23/the-slippery-slope/

So, basically it's a web version of the pattern applied by Appsfire http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002241 http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/05/21/manipulating-app-store…

Some lazy registration systems capture email addresses without forcing the user to create a password. That's what ours does. http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2009/03/16/signup-forms-must-die-… [edit] We have an email alert feature on our job board platform, that allows job-seekers to get email notifications for new job ads. Standard functionality. When we removed the registration barrier from this user journey (so it's now just a single text field and submit button), email alert creation rates basically doubled on most client sites. http://labsblog.madgex.com/2010/10/the-impact-of-email-activation-on-c…

Full url: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2008/06/16/sign-up-ramp-up-design…

An accept/decline button on installing additional software is just as bad as a pre-ticked box. If you've ever done user studies with people installing software you'll notice 90% click the next button until it's done without reading the pages The way that the accept button is positioned in these "optional" offers makes it look like you have to click it to proceed. This is exactly what a dark pattern is (http://darkpatterns.org/ or http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2013/07/23/the-slippery-slope/). I downloaded Filezilla from Sourceforge to see how this offer system is implemented - http://i.imgur.com/7tZuUoE.png. From quickly glancing at the window it looks like accept is the only valid way of continuing with the installer. Furthermore the program installs Hotspot Shield which will constantly show the user ads after it's installed, I doubt even 1% of the people installing Hotspot shield through this offer want it on their PC.

It looks like I can't use that as an example because I can't find the paper I read about it. I can't even remember when it was, and the only vague time association I have suggests that it was 15 years ago. So here are some more examples: http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/12/16/adding-delays-to-incre… . One is: > One of the things they found in user testing was that when new users clicked “Create my Blog” on the last step of the setup process, they were confused at how quickly their blog was created. “That’s it? Is something wrong?” were the types of things people said. So they added an interstitial “Creating your blog…” type page that did nothing but spin a little animated gif and wait a few seconds before sending new users to the “Yay, your blog is created! page”. Users were far more satisfied with the new experience that took longer.” Another example (in addition to the Coinstar one) is by a commenter at the bottom of the page.