Part 2: Exploitative strategies

There are lots of different ways you can consider the underlying psychology and principles behind deceptive patterns. A good starting point is to think of them as the result of an exploitative business strategy. In other words, instead of a business thinking of its users as partners who should be cooperated with to reach mutual success (‘Their success is our success’), the business thinks of its users as a commodity to be exploited (‘Their weakness is our opportunity’). Another aspect of the exploitative mindset is the business’s attitude towards law: rather than seeing it as a system to be respected, the law might be seen as a game to be played, where loopholes and grey areas can be identified and exploited for profit.

If we look at it in a simplistic way, exploitative strategies are often going to be more effective than cooperative strategies because they sidestep the need to let users make an informed choice. It’s a bit like wondering whether a fishing net is going to be more effective than just asking fish to jump into your boat. The fishing net is a trap, similar to a deceptive pattern. If you impede a user’s ability to make an informed choice, or if you hinder their decision-making by hiding facts or by giving misleading information, then you effectively capture or lock in the user against their will (though they may not realise it at the time owing to a lack of clearly stated information).

Generally, businesses do not admit to themselves that they are using exploitative strategies. If a business focuses on growth and measured outcomes, it can slip into an exploitative mindset without realising it. Euphemisms are also very common in businesses (for example, a subscription that automatically renews without an email reminder might be glossed as ‘We are helping users enjoy an uninterrupted service’), and the true consequences of a design decision may be far away from the people who implement it. In large tech companies, customer service teams are often outsourced overseas, far from headquarters where the decision-making happens. When users are presented as charts and data dashboards in executive meetings, their humanity is stripped away, and it’s easy to slip into thinking of them as just numbers, a commodity to be processed and from which value is extracted.

Generally, businesses do not admit to themselves that they are using exploitative strategies. If a business focuses on growth and measured outcomes, it can slip into an exploitative mindset without realising it. Euphemisms are also very common in businesses (for example, a subscription that automatically renews without an email reminder might be glossed as ‘We are helping users enjoy an uninterrupted service’), and the true consequences of a design decision may be far away from the people who implement it. In large tech companies, customer service teams are often outsourced overseas, far from headquarters where the decision-making happens. When users are presented as charts and data dashboards in executive meetings, their humanity is stripped away, and it’s easy to slip into thinking of them as just numbers, a commodity to be processed and from which value is extracted.

The best way to explain deceptive patterns is to start by looking at the exploitative design strategies – so you come to understand the theory, principles and goals – and then look at the result of the strategies, so you can then have a good basis for understanding the specific types and examples of deceptive patterns in the wild.

Professor Colin M. Gray and their team at Purdue University’s UXP2 Lab were among the first researchers to look closely at the exploitative design strategies that lead to deceptive patterns.¹ Expanding on their work, I present eight types of exploitative design strategy in this chapter. These are summarised below.

• Exploiting perceptual vulnerabilities: Before a human can reason about information, they have to perceive it first. Since human perception is not perfect, the shortcomings can be exploited to hide information, e.g. low contrast, small text.
• Exploiting vulnerabilities in comprehension: Humans have limits to literacy, numeracy, critical thinking and memory. An exploitative designer can make something more complicated than it needs to be, e.g. the use of verbose terms and conditions.
• Exploiting vulnerabilities in decision-making: Cognitive biases are systematic errors in reasoning that all humans tend to make. They can be exploited to interfere with decision-making, e.g. a preselected checkbox can take advantage of the default effect.
• Exploiting expectations: Helpful design involves employing standards to make a product predictable for users. These standards can be subverted to trick users, e.g. making an ‘X’ button mean ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’.
• Resource depletion and pressure: Humans have a limited supply of attention, energy and time. Once these resources become depleted, users may give up; they may feel pressure; and they may become fatigued and vulnerable to other tricks, e.g. cookie consent dialogs often require extreme effort to opt out, wearing users down until they give in.
• Forcing and blocking: ‘Forcing’ involves putting a mandatory step in front of the action the user wants to complete, which they cannot decline, e.g. mandatory registration in order to complete a purchase. ‘Blocking’ involves the outright removal of a feature, e.g. preventing the user from exporting their own data.
• Exploiting emotional vulnerabilities: Humans do not like to experience uncomfortable emotions like guilt, shame, fear or regret, and will often take measures to avoid them, e.g. to decline an offer for a fitness course, the user must click ‘No thanks, I want to be unhealthy.’
• Exploiting addiction: Humans are prone to addiction, where a habit develops harmful outcomes and becomes difficult to give up. This involves a cycle of behaviour that can be intensified through design techniques like infinite scroll or autoplay.