Dark Patterns

When you use a website or an app, someone has previously decided where each button sits, how big it is, and what color it has. Usually this is meant to make things easier for you. But sometimes it’s exactly the opposite: the design is meant to push you in a direction that benefits the provider and harms you. Such deliberately misleading design tricks are called dark patterns. The term comes from British design researcher Harry Brignull, who coined it in 2010. It’s important to note the difference from bad design: a dark pattern is not an oversight, it’s intentional.

Why a colorful button is worth money

Large platforms have millions of visitors per day. If a small design change convinces just one percent of them to subscribe, that adds up to enormous sums. That’s exactly why such details are systematically tested. Companies try out two versions of a page on real users and keep the one that brings more sales. Whether that version is also fair is not automatically measured in the process.

For you as a user, this means real costs. You keep paying for a subscription you actually wanted to cancel long ago. You agree to data sharing because declining takes three extra clicks. You end up buying insurance that was already checked off. In total, this amounts to billions that consumers spend unintentionally every year.

Authorities now see this as more than a mere nuisance. The European Union’s Digital Services Act explicitly bans certain manipulative interfaces. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also fined companies over this. The accusation in such cases is that the customer’s consent wasn’t truly voluntary.

The typical tricks at a glance

One common pattern is the mismatched button pair. The “Accept all cookies” button glows large and colorful, while the reject option sits small and gray next to it. Technically, both paths are equally accessible, but visually they are not. Related to this is the “Roach Motel”: signing up for a subscription takes two clicks, while canceling is buried deep in the settings. The name refers to a cockroach trap that’s easy to enter and hard to leave.

Other patterns work with emotions. Artificial scarcity claims that only two rooms are left, even though that’s not true. A countdown creates time pressure and simply resets once it expires. With “confirmshaming,” the decline link is worded so shamefully that clicking it makes you feel bad, for example “No, I don’t want to save money.”

A third group hides information. Additional costs only appear at the very last step of checkout, once you’ve already invested time. Checkboxes for newsletters are pre-selected, so that doing nothing counts as consent. All these tricks exploit the same human weakness: we almost always take the path of least resistance and rarely read the fine print.

Recognizing dark patterns and what AI is changing about them

You encounter them practically every day. Cookie banners are the best-known example, while streaming services and fitness apps with hard-to-cancel subscriptions are the most costly one. Mobile games use them too, for instance when a purchase button appears exactly where the “next” button just was. A good self-test is to ask: does the path I actually want to take feel needlessly cumbersome? If so, there’s often intent behind it.

What’s new is the combination with artificial intelligence. Learning systems can tailor interfaces individually for each user. Someone who hesitates longer at night might then see a different price or a more urgent-seeming offer. Experts speak of personalized manipulation, because the trick targets an individual’s specific weak spot.

In the news, dark patterns usually come up in connection with fines or consumer lawsuits. A common misconception is confusing dark patterns with advertising. Advertising is allowed to persuade, and does so openly. A dark pattern, by contrast, deceives about the interaction itself: it makes you believe you made a free choice.