Stop mistreating your customers, please.
Why dark patterns always lose to light patterns in the long run
The web gets worse every year
In UX design terms, a dark pattern is a design choice that intentionally tries to mislead, deceive, trick, or annoy users into taking (or not taking) actions they wish to take (or not take).
For example, the New York Times is a great institution that I admire. I think they’re doing a lot of good in the world, which is why I subscribed in November 2016 (I shall leave it as an exercise to the reader as to why I was thusly motivated).
It’s easy to subscribe, but to cancel, you have to either jump into a painful live chat, or call them. On the phone. During certain hours only. In 2020.
(Note: I believe the chat option is relatively new. When I looked at this awhile back, a phone call was the only option as I recall.)
This is known as a “roach motel”, which means it’s easy to get into but difficult to get out of.
There is just no excuse for this kind of customer-hostility. Or bullshit like this, from some random online marketing blog:
Amusingly, that last example is both customer-hostile and broken. Neither button works.
There are so many of these on the web in 2020 that large swaths of it are becoming unusable. Here’s a Forbes link I clicked on while writing this post:
The actual “content” is a shitty slideshow with 1-sentence captions. You have to scroll down past the giant ad to even click the next and previous buttons on the slideshow. And every click reloads the page (to boost ad impressions) and scrolls you back up to the top to see the ad again. Yes, I have an adblocker but the page won’t even display if you have it enabled.
Everyone involved in creating this masterpiece of customer-hostility should be ashamed. You are making the world a darker place.
And this isn’t even the worst of it! I wasn’t assaulted with a half dozen popups asking me for my email address, for consent to be tracked, for browser notifications, etc.
For example:
Or this travesty:
I found all these examples in about 5 minutes. Now I need a drink, and it’s only 7:40am.
Dark patterns are a downward spiral
Stepping back from the horror show of modern web design, I would classify dark patterns more broadly as any action taken that is hostile to customers for the sake of financial gain.
The best companies focus on creating as much value as possible for customers, and capturing a relatively small slice of that value.
But companies that are dark-pattern-oriented flip that equation around and focus on capturing as much value as possible, regardless of how much value they create. Many bad companies capture far more value than they create, leaving the customer with a net loss of value.
The worst examples create negative value for their customers and the world at large. We’re all worse off because of their existence, and yet they still manage to extract money from us, usually due to some form of lobbying, regulatory capture, or other rent-seeking.
For example, a military industrial complex that spends trillions of dollars to first blow up and then rebuild infrastructure on the other side of the planet. Or giant unrealistic space exploration programs that are actually jobs programs in disguise and never actually launch anything. Or private prisons that lobby against criminal justice reform while steadily destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Those are the examples that come to mind for me. Yours may be different, depending on your definition of “value”.
It’s a scarcity model that views all interactions as zero sum: for the company to win, customers need to lose.
Aside from the ethical question of whether you should rampage through the world capturing value for yourself at everyone else’s expense, the problem with dark patterns is that their effectiveness tends to drop over time. Indeed, one heuristic for whether something is a dark pattern is whether it becomes more or less effective over time. Another might be if it becomes more or less effective once customers are made aware of it.
As customers get more savvy and informed, they start to see these patterns for what they are, and avoid them. Trust and goodwill are eroded. And thus the dark-pattern-oriented business needs to put in place a new set of dark patterns to keep extracting the same amount of value. This pattern tends to be self-reinforcing, as the organization’s focus increasingly shifts to a cat-and-mouse game against their customers.
Enter…light patterns!
In contrast to the idea of dark patterns, I’ve been thinking about the concept of “light patterns”, or actions taken that are customer-friendly at an immediate cost to the business.
Two recent examples:
Free Memberships for the Making Sense Podcast
The Making Sense Podcast with Sam Harris is now listener-supported, and you can’t listen to all the episodes in their entirety unless you subscribe.
(By the way, I love this growing trend of content creators being compensated directly by their fans via subscriptions and memberships. See the PS block below for more.)
Sam opens every podcast episode with an announcement that you’ll need to subscribe to hear the entire episode, but then he says this:
I never want money to be the reason why someone can’t listen to the podcast, so if you can’t afford a subscription, there’s an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked.
This isn’t a theoretical benefit that’s actually impossible to find on the website either:
And its not onerous or invasive to actually submit the request:
Now, to be fair, I don’t know how well this is working for Sam. Maybe this guy is right and he’s not making much money from this overall strategy. But I believe he has taken a similar approach with the Waking Up meditation app, and as I recall that has a growing staff behind it. This site estimates revenue of $800k per month for the Waking Up app, which doesn’t seem that outlandish to me, given the amount meditation apps are making. Apparently giving away a few free memberships doesn’t mean you can’t build a meaningful business.
Easier ClassPass Cancellations
I recently saw a story about how ClassPass and other subscription services are making it easier to cancel. It used to be that you had to cancel with a human operator via live chat. I went through that flow myself last year, and it was super annoying. I had to just keep saying I want to cancel, over and over, while they threw various options and sweeteners and arguments at me to convince me to stay.
Now they’re doing away with that and letting members just cancel via automated methods:
“We know the ability to pause or make changes to a membership is something our members deeply value,” Ms. Cowher Hill said. “And this isn’t just true for ClassPass. Globally, there is a growing desire for a frictionless cancellation flow, especially for subscription services, and we’re proud to be making strides to deliver that.”
Reading between the lines of corporate bullshit speak here: the ability to easily pause or cancel a membership was always something that members deeply value, so why now?
Answer: because ClassPass was getting a reputation as a roach motel, and that was keeping members from signing up in the first place. Or if they went through the live chat cancellation option like I did, they might vow to never return and have to face that again.
But if ClassPass can change consumer perception to where they’re known as a service that makes it very easy to pause and cancel, customers will be less nervous to sign up and ClassPass will get more users over time.
(Side note: I suspect that’s also the reason you’re reading about this in the Wall Street Journal. ClassPass or someone else in the article probably pitched the story as part of a PR campaign to spread awareness of their new joyful experience of cancelling.)
I sound like I’m being critical of ClassPass, but I’m not. I wish they had done this from the start, but better late than never. Hopefully more companies choose light patterns over dark going forward.
With light patterns, everybody wins…eventually
Both of these policies positively affect everyone who is aware of them, not just those that take advantage of them. When I hear that Sam gives away free accounts to anyone who asks, I trust him more. The same is true for ClassPass making it easy to pause or cancel. I’m more likely to sign up in the first place because of that trust.
So while there might be a short-term cost (ClassPass having more cancellations and Sam giving away more free accounts), they create more overall value and more captured value for the business in the long run.
And unlike dark patterns, light patterns tend to become more effective over time and as consumers become aware of them, not less.
But since most of the benefit of light patterns comes in the form of increased trust, goodwill, and word of mouth marketing, the payoff can take time. This is perhaps one reason that light patterns are more rare than dark patterns. Making “costly” investments today in trust and goodwill that won’t pay off for a long time is not as tempting as something that will get immediate results.
Do you have any favorite examples of light patterns? I’d love to hear about them!
Much love,
Ryan
PS - as I mentioned above, I love the growing trend of people like Sam Harris asking their fans to directly support their work via subscriptions and memberships. One of my favorite examples of this is the explosion in paid email newsletters. It’s hard to get more simple and elegant than: “Pay me a few bucks every month, and I’ll send you valuable emails.” I like this model so much that I’m launching a paid email newsletter about paid email newsletters, called newsletter². It’s going to be free to start while I get my legs under me, and the first weekly edition will be out this coming Friday. If you have any interest in the space, I’d love your feedback!