What are dark patterns in web design?
Dark patterns are interface designs that steer people into choices they would not otherwise make. Researchers sort them by strategy or by attribute, and regulators have started to write the attribute reading into rules.
Answer to the question
What are dark patterns in web design?
Dark patterns are interface designs that steer people towards choices they would not make if the options were laid out plainly. Harry Brignull began naming them in 2010. Researchers classify them by strategy, as Colin Gray's team did in 2018, or by attributes such as asymmetry, covertness and deception, as Arunesh Mathur's team did in 2019.
Key takeaways
- Gray and colleagues (2018) analysed 118 practitioner-identified examples and proposed five strategies: nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference and forced action.
- Mathur and colleagues (2019) crawled about 11,000 shopping sites and found 1,818 instances in 15 types and 7 categories, on about 11 per cent of the sites surveyed.
- Mathur and two colleagues (2021) reviewed 19 definitions and found them inconsistent, which is why attributes such as asymmetry and covertness travel better than a single definition.
- Nouwens and colleagues (2020) found that only 11.8 per cent of a 680-strong sample from the top 10,000 UK sites met minimum consent requirements, and in a 40-person experiment removing the first-page opt-out raised consent by 22 to 23 percentage points.
- The FTC's 2022 staff report and Article 25 of the EU Digital Services Act both describe effects on a person's ability to decide rather than naming a technique.
A cookie banner can pair a bright button that says Accept all with a grey one that says Manage options. Designers have a name for that difference. Researchers still argue over what it covers.
The name is dark patterns: interface designs that steer people towards choices they would not make if the options were laid out plainly. Jon Yablonski's Laws of UX describes them as ways of getting people to do things they did not intend, for the sake of engagement or a sale, and says the techniques are found all over the internet (2024). The research since 2010 has been less settled about where the boundary sits than the phrase suggests.
Dark patterns are interface tricks that steer people into choices they would not make with the options laid out plainly.
Naming, Sorting and Counting
Harry Brignull started a website in 2010 to expose these practices and educate the public. It was called darkpatterns.org, and it now runs as deceptive.design, which prefers the term deceptive patterns after advice from the Tech Policy Design Lab. The phrase spread from that site into design blogs, news stories and, eventually, the reports of regulators.
A word coined for a campaign does not arrive with a definition.
The first systematic attempt to find out what people meant by it came eight years later.
Colin Gray and four colleagues at Purdue University gathered, for a 2018 paper, 118 examples that practitioners had labelled dark patterns. They came from social media (45), design blogs (40), news outlets (19), the researchers' own use of products (10) and darkpatterns.org (4). From the corpus they proposed five strategies. Nagging is repeated interruption. Obstruction makes a task harder than it needs to be, in order to dissuade an action. Sneaking hides, disguises or delays information the user would object to. Interface interference favours some actions over others through layout, with hidden information, preselection and aesthetic manipulation as subtypes. Forced action requires a specific act, such as handing over data, as the price of access.
Gray's team also reported that the examples of dark patterns raised a wide range of ethical concerns that practitioners often conflated under the one term, and that designers worried about becoming complicit in manipulative practice.
A year later a team led by Arunesh Mathur at Princeton University built software to find dark patterns rather than collect them. It crawled about 53,000 product pages from roughly 11,000 shopping sites and found 1,818 instances, in 15 types and 7 categories. It identified 183 websites engaging in deceptive practices and 22 third-party companies supplying dark patterns as ready-made services. The paper puts the instances on 1,254 sites, about 11 per cent of those surveyed, and calls that a lower bound because the method reads only text-based interfaces and a sample of pages.
The seven categories are sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction and forced action. Hidden costs, low-stock messages and [countdown timers whose deadline is not real](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-a-countdown-timer-adds-to-a-sale) are among the fifteen types. The labels matter less than five questions the authors ask of any design.
| Attribute | The question it asks |
|---|---|
| Asymmetric | Does the design put unequal weight on the available choices? |
| Covert | Is the effect of the design hidden from users? |
| Deceptive | Does it create false beliefs through misstatements, misleading statements or omissions? |
| Hides information | Does it obscure or delay necessary information? |
| Restrictive | Does it restrict the choices available to users? |
The full paper also reports that shopping sites ranked as more popular were more likely to feature dark patterns, which is the claim Yablonski's book repeats and the abstract does not state.
Why the Definition Slips
Nineteen definitions of dark patterns, drawn from academic work, law and policy, were the raw material for a 2021 review by Mathur and two colleagues. They sorted the definitions into four facets: characteristics of the interface, mechanisms of effect, the designer's role, and benefits and harms. The definitions were inconsistent: an element required by one was optional in another, and "trick" was rarely defined. The authors kept the five attributes above, added a sixth, disparate treatment, and set out four lenses for judging harm: individual welfare, collective welfare, regulatory objectives and individual autonomy. Each lens has its own weakness. Individual welfare, for instance, needs a baseline for what users would have wanted, which is hard to establish.
The two routes disagree in a useful way. Gray's starts from what designers already call dark and asks which strategy is at work. Mathur's starts from what a design does to a choice and asks which attributes are present. Both cannot be the definition, and the second travels better, because an attribute can be checked on a page without knowing what the designer intended.
We side with the attribute reading.
Cookie Banners as Evidence
Consent pop-ups let researchers compare design with law directly. Midas Nouwens and colleagues scraped the designs of the five most popular consent management platforms on the top 10,000 UK websites, a sample of 680. They report that dark patterns and implied consent were ubiquitous, and that only 11.8 per cent met the minimum requirements the authors drew from European law.
They then ran a field experiment with 40 participants on eight common designs. Notification style, banner or barrier, had no effect on consent. Removing the opt-out button from the first page raised consent by 22 to 23 percentage points. Offering more granular controls on the first page lowered it by 8 to 20 points. The banner in the opening sits close to that design: refusal exists, but not on the first screen.
Larger experiments on American adults, described in [an earlier article on design and blame](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/when-the-design-is-to-blame-not-you), found that mild dark patterns raised sign-up for an unwanted service well above a control group.
How Regulators Define It
Regulators have taken the effects-based reading of dark patterns. On 15 September 2022 the US Federal Trade Commission released a staff report, Bringing Dark Patterns to Light. It grouped its concerns into four tactics: misleading consumers and disguising ads, making it hard to cancel, burying key terms and junk fees, and tricking people into sharing data. The accompanying press release cited alleged cancellation obstacles, the pattern behind [subscriptions that are easy to start and hard to leave](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/the-sludge-that-keeps-you-subscribed), and alleged fee information hidden behind tooltips.
In the European Union, Article 25 of the Digital Services Act says providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their interfaces so as to deceive or manipulate users, or to materially distort or impair their ability to make free, informed choices. Its second paragraph leaves out practices already covered by the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive or the GDPR. Article 25 describes effects on a person's ability to decide and does not name a technique. That sits closer to Mathur's attributes than to Gray's strategies.
In the EU, platforms may not design interfaces that deceive users or weaken their ability to choose freely.
On a single screen the attribute questions reduce to one comparison. Count the steps and attention that your preferred choice costs, then count the same for the choice the page prefers. Where the two differ and nothing says so, the design is doing the steering.
Common questions
What are dark patterns in web design?
Design choices on a site or app that steer people towards decisions they would not make if the options were laid out plainly, such as hidden costs, fake urgency, a refusal button that is hard to find or a cancellation that is harder than sign-up. Harry Brignull began naming them in 2010.
How common are dark patterns?
A 2019 crawl of about 11,000 shopping sites by Arunesh Mathur and colleagues found 1,818 instances, on about 11 per cent of the sites surveyed. The authors call that a lower bound.
Are dark patterns illegal?
Not as a single category. The US Federal Trade Commission has brought cases over cancellation obstacles, items sneaked into shopping carts and deceptive marketing, and Article 25 of the EU Digital Services Act bars online platforms from interfaces that deceive or manipulate users, with the exceptions it states.
Sources
Yablonski, J. (2024). Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media. Seed book; vault hub Books/Laws of UX.
Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). “The dark (patterns) side of UX design.” Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paper 534. doi:10.1145/3173574.3174108 https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108
Mathur, A., Acar, G., Friedman, M. J., Lucherini, E., Mayer, J., Chetty, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). “Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 81. doi:10.1145/3359183 https://doi.org/10.1145/3359183
Mathur, A., Kshirsagar, M., & Mayer, J. (2021). “What makes a dark pattern... dark? Design attributes, normative considerations, and measurement methods.” Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3411764.3445610 https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445610
Nouwens, M., Liccardi, I., Veale, M., Karger, D., & Kagal, L. (2020). “Dark patterns after the GDPR: Scraping consent pop-ups and demonstrating their influence.” Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3313831.3376321 https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376321
Luguri, J., & Strahilevitz, L. J. (2021). “Shining a light on dark patterns.” Journal of Legal Analysis, 13(1), 43-109. doi:10.1093/jla/laaa006 https://doi.org/10.1093/jla/laaa006
US Federal Trade Commission (2022). “FTC report shows rise in sophisticated dark patterns designed to trick and trap consumers.” Press release on the staff report Bringing Dark Patterns to Light, 15 September 2022. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/09/ftc-report-shows-rise-sophisticated-dark-patterns-designed-trick-trap-consumers
European Union (2022). Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act), Article 25, Online interface design and organisation. Official Journal L 277, 27 October 2022. https://www.springlex.eu/en/packages/dsa/dsa-regulation/article-25/
Brignull, H. Deceptive Patterns (formerly darkpatterns.org), About. https://www.deceptive.design/about-us