Dark patterns - What they are and what having to implement them says about your job
2021-04-04 , Piscopia
Language: English

If you use the web regularly, you probably keep running into sites that seem to be built to be unusable.
Thinking that it's better to assume incompetence than malevolence (and because you don't really have much of a choice) you disregard that thought and continue on with using the site.

However, sometimes people actually do act malevolently and often times building a bad user experience can lead to larger profits: People who abandon their attempt to cancel some subscription, accept to receive newsletters and store whatever tracking cookies one throws at them, simply because they are too tired from having to navigate the other options, end up being seen as more "valuable" customers.

In this talk I want to have a look at those dark patterns from the perspective of both an end user and a developer who's had to implement them to pay their rent.
I want to show you how to find dark patterns (so you can complain about them, if you're able to, which might lead to their removal) and why a job where you're asked to build them is probably not worth keeping.


Fragenpad: https://di.c3voc.de/pad/r2r:talk:JLXJDB

See also: Slides (1.4 MB)

I'm a full stack developer with a morbid curiosity about brokenness in the technology we use every day.

When I'm not tinkering with that kind of stuff, I try to make the web more accessible by building accessible web sites and telling others how to do that.

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