By Ruppal Walia Sharma
The line between effective persuasion and sly deception to get the desired action from consumers is increasingly blurred by the rampant spread of deceptive patterns across apps and websites. Have you heard of ‘Sludge’, ‘Roach’ and ‘Sneak’? These are not names of shady characters but descriptions of how deceptive patterns can be used to trick users into performing actions they did not intend to.
How often have we found the ‘strictly necessary cookies’ button difficult to locate while the ‘accept all cookies’ button is staring us in the face? How often have we been ‘confirmed shamed’ with messages like “No, I don’t wish to secure my future,” when we refused to take up an offer or accept an option? In how many instances have we had to dig through multiple headings to find the process for a refund or been confounded by statements with double negatives—uncertain if checking or unchecking the box will lead us to what we want to say?
The ‘Conscious Patterns’ report, released in August 2024 and based on a study conducted by ASCI Academy and Parallel HQ in India, identified an average of 2.7 deceptive patterns per app, with health-tech apps exhibiting the highest prevalence of such patterns, followed by travel booking and fintech sectors. This study analysed over 1,200 screens across 53 top apps covering nine different industries. All apps studied (with one exception) had at least one deceptive pattern. Two to four deceptive patterns were identified in 64% of the apps, while five or more were identified in 7.5% of the apps.
These numbers are not surprising but are reason enough to sound the alarm bells and shift the focus towards corrective actions. In ASCI’s report, Privacy Deception, Interface Interference, Drip Pricing and False Urgency were found to be the most prevalent deceptions in Indian apps.
Over the last few years, there have been a multitude of studies globally, analysing different types of deceptive patterns, a term attributed to Harry Brignulli (2010). The Nielsen Norman Group explain this very well as “design patterns that prompt users to take an action that benefits the company employing the pattern by deceiving, misdirecting, shaming, or obstructing the user’s ability to make another (less profitable) choice.”
Understanding how people think can help us design environments that encourage beneficial choices. Initially, much of the discourse centred around the positive aspect of nudges, defined by Thaler and Sunstein as interventions that maintain freedom of choice but direct behaviour towards beneficial outcomes. Nudges are expected to be transparent and easy to opt out of and should result in behaviour which improves people’s welfare.
An example could be placing a salad bar at the front of a cafeteria to encourage healthy eating. However, anything that directs consumer behaviour in a different direction also has the potential for misuse. Such misuse has been defined by Thaler and Sunstein as sludge—interventions that “make it harder for people to obtain an outcome that will make them better off .”
Using deception patterns in app or website design is one way of sludging. Examples include obstruction when firms lower their churn rate by making it difficult for users to unsubscribe even when they wish to do so (roach motel) or privacy deception, when firms make consumers reveal more personal data than they wish to share. Nagging or persistently pushing users to accept something even if they have already declined, sneaking items into the cart through pre-selection, sneaking in additional charges at the time of checkout (drip pricing), UI manipulations like lighter colour ‘No’ buttons and brighter ‘Yes’ buttons, hidden information, false urgency, double negatives, etc., are all examples of deceptive patterns that are not in the consumer’s interest.
It is important to differentiate between persuasion tactics and deceptive patterns. A brand highlighting genuine customer reviews is ethical persuasion; however, when a brand only highlights select positive reviews while making the negative reviews or detailed comments difficult to find, it is clearly a deceptive pattern. Highlighting a genuine shortage of a product is a legitimate way to present a call to action, but misleading the consumer with artificial time pressures or false scarcity is deception.
Globally, there have been instances of action taken against brands for using deceptive patterns. For instance, The New York Times was held liable in US courts in May 2023 for failing to clearly disclose automatic subscription renewal terms, leading to unauthorised charges, while TikTok was penalised by the EU and UK Irish Data Protection Commission in September 2023 for nudging children towards privacy-intrusive settings (deceptive. design, 2023). In India, DoCA issued guidelines on the prevention and regulation of 13 deceptive patterns in November 2023.
Experiments conducted in 2020 by Geronimo et al. revealed that while most users do not recognise deceptive patterns, they are better able to do so when they are informed. The need, therefore, is to come up with measures that help track and control the extent of such deceptions. ASCI’s attempt to develop a ‘Conscious Score’ to help developers measure where their app design stands on a scale of deceptive to conscious is a step in the right direction. By answering questions from a pre-set quiz on user flows in the selected app, developers can arrive at a conscious score and then explore ethical alternatives to improve the score.
The author is professor, marketing; chairperson, Post Graduate Programme in General Management; and Head, Delhi Centre, SPJIMR. (Views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of financialexpress.com)