When was the last time you saw that attractive purse you’d love to buy, added it to the cart, and then bought more than you wanted to just because it said you could get ‘free shipping’ if you shopped for more than Rs.150? That ‘value for money’ eyelash you spent another Rs.75 for is now gathering dust, until you realise you had no use for it when you declutter before Diwali.
Why online experience matters more than ever
For brands dependent on e-commerce sales, every step in the purchasing journey- from discovering the product, ensuring it fits, exploring alternatives to checkout- is carefully choreographed to ensure you don’t leave empty-handed, but end up with a bag much bigger than what you expected to buy.
The entire buying experience hinges on the way the brand is perceived, and the design, language and illustrations used to evoke positive emotions crucial to drive conversions. That’s why every point of contact- from a customised landing page designed for social media visitors to individual product pages and videos- are carefully choreographed to drive conversions through subtle design tricks, confusing layouts or narratives to guide quick decision making.
Although using psychological and cognitive biases in marketing has been an old trick, sometimes brands take things too far, especially when their brand’s success depends on festive times like Diwali.
To boost sales, brands use one or a combination of these major dark patterns to induce conversions.
- Confirmshaming: To pressure users into choosing a choice that suits them, brands sometimes resort to shaming language. This could include shaming customers declining offers with ‘No, I don’t want to save money’ or ‘No, I don’t seek amazing deals’ for divulging their personal details.
- Bait-and-switch: Here, brands offer a specific product (often higher in value or heavily discounted) that may offer a better deal on a variant that was initially chosen.
- Drip Pricing: First, a low price is quoted on the product page, but additional fees, taxes or charges are added by the time you reach the checkout page.
- Misdirection: Here, the user is urged to choose a specific option using bold colors or actions to highlight the business’s preferred action. This trick is extensively used for subscription-based services.
- Forced Action: Some brands force you to share your personal data (email ID, phone number, or card details for a token payment) to get you limited-time access to their product or service. This lets them collect customer data, which they can use later to induce you for purchase.
- False Urgency: Some brands use urgency or FOMO to induce sales. For instance, on many product pages ‘Only 1 left in stock’ option is shown to show urgency for a purchase.
Why brands continue to use dark patterns
Though dark patterns are unethical, and many times deceitful, many e-commerce brands continue to use them, including leading brands like Amazon and Flipkart. There is a risk to their reputation here, but the financial rewards that undetected dark patterns offer is a chance they’re willing to take. After all, competition continues to rise, but the growth in demand remains uncertain.
Even though social media has been amplifying customer complaints, brands have been forced to draw a line between ethics and business considerations. The government has also stepped in to protect consumer interests, with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDPA) and the Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (CP Act). These regulations have been designed to empower the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) to take action against errant brands, based on complaints of using any one of the commonly used dark patterns for misleading customers.
However, these regulations have proved to be insufficient due to a lack of technical expertise, with some brands conveniently side-stepping these regulations through cross-border digital infrastructure. With rapid advances in User Interface/ User Experience (UI/UX) design, it is increasingly difficult for regulators like CCPA to prove the misuse of customer trust through dark patterns.
“Some dark patterns are subtle and hard to spot and companies might say that users gave consent or had a choice. Additionally, the fast-evolving digital environment and cross-border operations complicate enforcement. The CCPA will likely rely on patterns, like repeated complaints, design screenshots and user data, to show a deceptive and manipulative design interface by the platform, which may be classified as dark patterns,” Karun Mehta, a corporate lawyer at Khaitan & Co, explained.
Moral, ethical designer dilemmas
UI/UX designers, tasked with creating the front-end interface and personality of the brand, have sometimes had to put their foot down when demands for unethical design tweaks get out of hand.
“I refuse implementing dark patterns and instantly call them out with management as soon as the marketing or product team starts asking for them. I prefer to change company than to lower the standards of my work.
I am in this industry precisely for my work ethics. As a UX designer I am probably one of the last roles to have the luxury of being able to advocate for the final user,” one designer explained in an anonymous online forum.
Another designer, in his earlier days, explained how he designed a pop-up that the business wanted him to make harder to cancel a subscription and ended up regretting it.
“I was asked to make the “Confirm cancellation” CTA the secondary button and the “I don’t want to cancel” the primary button in the subscription cancellation flow. I didn’t like doing it, but it’s what the business wanted,” he explained.
The next playground for dark patterns: AI
Though designers are traditionally responsible for implementing ethical standards for brand experiences, the rise of AI-led customer interactions has taken manipulative dark patterns to another level.
“Generative AI can supercharge dark patterns,” French lawyer Marie Potel-Saville, whose company Fair Patterns tracks, audits and assists companies to use ethical customer interactions, explains. “You don’t need AI to personalize interactions, but with AI, it’s much easier to do it at a massive, hyper-targeted scale.”
With many brands using AI to replace customer support executives and other human interactions with chatbots, the use of dark, manipulative tactics can go undetected. Many brands now hire AI ethicists to ensure their chatbots don’t learn manipulative tactics from past experiences, as cleaning up this could be a task that isn’t easy.
Others hire experts like Potel-Saville to identify and remove the data that could be misused by the automated chatbots. “If you don’t clean the data, the AI will just assume that these tactics are normal,” Potel-Saville explained in an interview with Forbes.
Caution for this festive season
Dark, manipulative design patterns are still widely used across e-commerce in India, with a recent audit by social media analyst firm LocalCircles saying that just 3% of e-commerce sites use completely ethical website designs.
The use of dark patterns remains widespread, but most of them go unnoticed due to their deceptive, carefully manipulative design. Awareness remains relatively low, yet there are avenues to complain about these patterns through portals managed by the CCPA and other agencies. This festive season comes with high hopes, which usually morph into higher chances of deception. There is a need to shift from the Once Bitten Twice Shy adage to the Jaago Grahak Jaago one, to discourage unethical business practices and offer a level playing field.
