Chapter 15: Urgency

Urgency can be sensible and genuine. There are only so many seats on that flight we want and only so many tickets for that concert, so we know we have to hurry or we’ll miss out. This is just the reality of resources in the physical world. But our appreciation of urgency is something that can be abused, and when retailers intentionally create a false sense of urgency, this is a deceptive pattern.

There are two main types of urgency deceptive pattern: fake countdown timers (usually a prominent, animated digital timer shown counting down to zero, whereupon the offer is meant to end – except it doesn’t); and fake limited time messages (usually a static piece of content stating that the offer will run out soon).

The countdown timer deceptive pattern

Countdown timers on Shopify using the Hurrify merchant app

If you want to start an e-commerce business, Shopify is a great place to start. They make it very easy to set up your store, and they deal with all sorts of complicated things for you, like international tax and shipping. They even have an app store. Surprisingly, the Shopify app store sometimes contains apps that make it easy to create deceptive patterns. In Shopify’s credit, they’ve been cracking down on this recently, but if you search their app store for terms like ‘countdown timer’, ‘social proof’ or ‘FOMO’ (‘fear of missing out’), you’ll probably see all sorts of questionable apps in your search results. These sorts of apps can usually be set up in an honest way, but sometimes they enable bad behaviour. For example, up until recently there was a Shopify app called Hurrify, made by a company called Twozillas (It was removed from the Shopify app store some time after I reported it in early 2023). Hurrify was used to create various fake urgency messages, one of which was a fake countdown timer.¹ One of the Twozillas founders, Yousef Khalidi, was interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and was asked about the ethics of the Hurrify app. He replied, ‘It’s just a tool … it’s exactly like a hammer: you can fix stuff with the hammer or you can kill somebody with the hammer.’²

As you’ll see in a moment, Hurrify was by no means as neutrally designed as a hammer, since it was explicitly designed to facilitate deception. You can see an example of Hurrify above, showing what a shopper sees when they view a product page that has been enhanced by a Hurrify campaign: ‘Hurry up! Sale ending in 11 Hrs, 59 Mins, 46 Sec. Sale Ends Once The Timer Hits Zero!’ An inspection of the Hurrify configuration interface shows that it was designed in a way that enables online businesses to easily show credible-looking but fake countdown timers on their e-commerce product pages. This is shown below:³

‍

The bottom dropdown menu is particularly brazen. The dropdown menu ‘Action When Timer ends’ defaults to ‘Run the campaign allover [sic] again (Evergreen)’. This means that the countdown timer is purely cosmetic. It just counts down to zero, goes back to the start and repeats infinitely, serving only to add fake time pressure to the user’s shopping experience. In other words, it’s a lie.

The limited time message deceptive pattern

The limited time message deceptive pattern is very easy to implement since it’s just a static piece of text on the page saying that the offer will expire soon – when in reality it won’t. Here’s an example from samsung.com in which the offer claims ‘limited time only’⁴, but in actual fact it has been on offer for multiple months (November and December 2022),⁵ and the discount was increased by $100 during that period.⁶