YSA Dark Patterns

Today I came across this great website that features the dirty tricks web designers play on people. Here is a presentation by the curator of the site, Harry Brignull:

I don’t find the books he featured teach dirty tricks, but according to the definition of dirty tricks Harry employs, they would:

This pattern library is dedicated to Dark Patterns: user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

To me, it is Harry’s examples of the ‘default’ and making it really hard for someone to opt-out that are excellent illustrations of dirty tricks. He offers more great ones on his Dark Patterns site. But the site also got me thinking about a post that we haven’t seen on YSAT yet. What dirty tricks have you seen in transmedia? What unethical actions have you seen? (And I’m not talking about what people do in the industry generally. Crikey, I could talk for ages about the dirty tactics people use. I’m talking about the dirty tricks in relation to the audience/player.)

Tags: Interaction Design