Dark patterns are as old as the internet itself. For over 30 years, the web has served as a breeding ground for manipulative design—and we’ve been attempting to stop it for nearly as long.
In an impressive act of foresight, Rolf Molich and Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group started creating a list of 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design as early as 1990, including the core trait that dark patterns omit: User control and freedom.
Little did they know that over the next few decades, that lack of control—which ranked third on their top 10 list—would be discussed on design blogs and conference stages in perpetuity. In 2010, the moniker “dark patterns” would be coined by user experience expert Harry Brignull, and by 2020, the concept of dark patterns would become so mainstream that Google’s latest home page redesign, featuring ads that were nearly indistinguishable from organic search results, would be criticized across media outlets worldwide.
Yet despite all the attention they receive, dark patterns continue to proliferate. We regularly click buttons that say, “No, I don’t like healthy food” just to dismiss an annoying pop-up, and we navigate through the labyrinth of turns it takes to cancel an account that we never intended to create in the first place. Why are we adapting instead of revolting?
The natural conclusion of many of these discussions is to look to designers; because they operate at the intersection of user and business needs, they have the power to keep both sides in balance. Articles encourage designers to push back on OKRs and speak out against features that don’t align with their values, painting them as referees in this game of tug-of-war, instead of the rope.