Responsible Design Part 11 of 14: Price Comparison Prevention

Price comparison prevention makes it difficult to compare the price of offers or products with other offers or products leading to an uninformed decision. Stuti Mazumdar & Symran Bhue – June 2022 How this pattern gets its name? Price comparison prevention gets its name from the way the pattern works – it prevents comparing […]
Responsible Design Part 10 of 14: Privacy Zuckering

Privacy Zuckering is a dark pattern that tricks users to disclose more personal information than the users had intended to. Stuti Mazumdar & Symran Bhue – May 2022 How this pattern gets its name? No points for guessing that this dark pattern is named after the Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. In 2010 […]
Responsible Design Part 9 of 14: Roach Motel

Roach Motel, dark pattern makes it very easy for users to sign up but very difficult to opt out. Stuti Mazumdar & Symran Bhue – May 2022 How this pattern gets its name? This dark pattern gets its name from an American Brand called Roach Motel which is a brand of a roach bait […]
Responsible Design Part 8 of 14: Trick Question

Trick Questions are questions that when read quickly seem to ask one thing but when read carefully seem to ask something else altogether. Stuti Mazumdar & Symran Bhue – May 2022 How this pattern gets its name? Trick Questions are like riddles – they can be questions or statements that elicit a certain call […]
Responsible Design Part 7 of 14: Sneak into Basket

Sneak into Basket dark pattern sneakily adds offers or items into the basket which the user ends up paying extra for. Stuti Mazumdar & Symran Bhue – May 2022 How this pattern gets its name? Sneak into Basket is exactly how it sounds – this dark pattern involves sneakily adding offers or items in […]
Responsible Design Part 6 of 14: Bait and Switch

Bait and switch is a dark pattern where the user sets out to do one thing but a completely different undesirable thing happens instead. Stuti Mazumdar & Symran Bhue – April 2022 How this pattern gets its name? Bait and switch have been a very common practice in the retail sector. It gets its […]
Responsible Design Part 5 of 14: Forced Continuity

Forced continuity is when your credit card continues to get billed and charged for a subscription service past the initial subscription duration. Stuti Mazumdar & Symran Bhue – April 2022 How this pattern gets its name? This dark pattern gets its name when we look at the discretionary point of view of the user. […]
Responsible Design Part 4 of 14: False Urgency

This dark pattern works on the idea of scarcity and how a user’s decision making is impacted under the pretext of scarce resources. False urgency works on the basis of loss aversion which is the notion that users prefer to avoid losses over acquiring gains. Stuti Mazumdar & Symran Bhue – April 2022 How […]
Responsible Design Part 3 of 14: Confirm Shaming or Guilt Shaming

This dark pattern uses manipulative language and emotionally-charged design tactics to shame or guilt users from cancelling or unsubscribing a service. How this pattern gets its name? The pattern gets its name from the kind of feeling it leaves the users with after they’ve read a message or statement. This dark pattern tries to make […]
Designing for Data creation, moving beyond Data driven Design

Being data-driven has become a synonym for being new-age. The best thing about data and its analytics is that it can show us what people do on their own. But what it doesn’t tell us much about is the context, motivations, and intent behind the data to make it useful enough. We explore how design […]