Chapter 7: Exploiting expectations

Everyone has expectations of websites and apps. Helpful designers play into those expectations by employing guidelines, user-centred patterns and design systems to make sure their products are consistent and predictable, so users don’t have to relearn how to use the product every time they do something new.¹

In a 2016 study, researchers Nikolaus and Bonhert gave 135 participants a grid and asked them to specify the expected location of common website elements like the logo, search and advertisements.² They compared the aggregated user expectations against fifty real website layouts. In the figure below, you can see how users generally expected the search feature to be near the top right of the page, while the real position of the search feature was also generally at the top right. This just goes to show that users usually know what to expect, and that designers usually know that it’s helpful to support those expectations.

An exploitative designer can take their knowledge of user expectations and treat it as a weakness to be exploited for profit. The most famous example of this is probably from the game Flappy Bird that soared to the top of the iOS app store rankings out of nowhere in 2013. At the time, the app store ranking algorithm boosted games to the top if they had frequent positive reviews, among other factors. The game involved a compelling loop of dying and retrying levels, and it employed a trivially simple deceptive pattern to generate more reviews: when retrying, the ‘play’ button was replaced by a ‘rate’ button, in the same screen location, size and visual style. This was frequently clicked accidentally by users who were seeking to retry the level, and they were taken into a page of the App Store inviting them to leave a review. Of course, this deceptive pattern was greatly supported by the fact that the game was fun, so most users were happy to leave a positive review, even though they’d arrived at the review page unintentionally. At one point, the game achieved over 700,000 US reviews in a month, more than a top-ranking game would normally receive in a year.

This specific type of deceptive pattern has been called ‘the fast forward trick’³ and ‘affirmative tunnelling’,⁴ though there are many other types of deceptive patterns that fall under the general strategy of exploiting user expectations, as we’ll see in subsequent chapters. It is most commonly referred to as ‘misdirection’, where the user is led to expect something they desire to happen, yet something else undesirable happens instead.