Are Designers using Dark Patterns without knowing it?
What are dark patterns?
Dark patterns are essentially deceptive design practices that trick users into making decisions they didn't intend to, often benefiting the experience owner at the person's expense.
This definition extends to a variety of tactics that manipulate user choices through coercion, deception, or misleading interfaces, which can lead to unintended and potentially harmful consequences.
Stuart Mills and colleagues' paper on Dark Patterns (Dark patterns and sludge audits: an integrated approach 2023) look into how dark patterns are connected to behavioral science, particularly the concepts of choice architecture and nudging, but with a critical distinction.
While nudging is designed to guide decision-making in a way that maintains the decision-maker's freedom of choice, dark patterns often cross ethical lines by coercing or tricking users into making certain choices, thus undermining their autonomy.
These tricks and tactics are not how I would think about behavior change or behavior design - because in behavior change we are meant to help people progress towards a better outcome.
The article further discussed an approach towards auditing online services, focusing on identifying and analyzing sludge and dark patterns.
Work like this is very important, to help avoid harm, but also to help designers avoid the wrong use of these tactics, which in some cases they may be doing without the knowledge that they are harmful.
This is the issue I have sometimes when I see people speaking about certain nudges, and not having enough of an understanding of what they can and can't cause because they saw it sold as behavioral science.
The tactic is the end of your design - without the proper strategy, and evaluation you are likely to have unintended consequences.
For me, designing for behavior should meet psychological needs and make sure that autonomy, competence, and relatedness can be accounted for in the design.
Therefore removing something like autonomy in design to coerce a sale or increase engagement is not only unethical, but if you are doing it, then you are not a behavioral designer, you are a manipulation or in the worst case, an addiction designer. (and in some cases, you may not even know it)