Dark patterns, also known as deceptive design or deceptive patterns, are essentially tricks. Websites and apps use dark patterns to manipulate users into making decisions they wouldn’t have otherwise ...

You’ve seen them before. Pop-ups with tiny X’s that make a window hard to close. Buttons and toggles in permissions boxes that are so confusing it’s difficult to understand what you’re agreeing to.

Dark patterns are design elements that deliberately obscure, mislead, coerce and/or deceive website visitors into making unintended and possibly harmful choices. Dark patterns can be found in many ...

Dark patterns are web design features designed to trick users into sharing their data or spend more money. Watch out for tricks like hard-to-cancel subscriptions, hidden costs in the checkout process ...

Turns out, there is a dark art of web design. Inventory trackers, countdown clocks and fake reviews are rampant on e-commerce sites, and all are used to influence how consumers buy. But their contents ...

The vast majority of websites you visit now greet you with a pop-up. This annoying impediment to your seamless web browsing is called the “cookie banner,” and it’s there to secure your consent, as per ...

Growing regulatory action to combat so-called “dark patterns” used in web design to influence consumer choice has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines, and promises to continue to be ...

Recently I wrote about the proliferation of dark patterns and tried to give readers a sense of just how widespread these practices are. But it is not just the pervasiveness of dark patterns that has ...

Dark patterns are clever but misleading design tricks used by websites and apps to push users into doing things they might ...

Anyone who’s been online in the last decade probably recognizes “dark patterns,” design tactics used on websites and apps that trick users into doing something — buying something, agreeing to ...

If you’ve ever had to call to cancel a subscription you signed up for online in seconds, uncheck a preselected agreement to receive ads in the mail or been tricked into upgrading to a premium economy ...