For any business, big or small, catering to the target audience with effective digital channels is a crucial objective. However, one of the most popular digital channels is still a website. Providing the customers with the right content and ethical products or services makes a business stand out.

In order to create and design a website that resonates best with your branding assets while adding user-specific elements is the main task, and the rest follows.

Other than investing in the most effective domain and web hosting packages, choosing the right website builder or web design expert is also necessary to completely avoid deceptive design danger patterns. 

This blog will dig deeper into the different deceptive design danger patterns and the top ways to avoid them. 

All About Deceptive Design Patterns

Deceptive design patterns, called dark patterns, are a strategic web design technique that taps into human psychology to convince users to participate or make decisions based on limited or filtered information.

Simply put, a deceptive design pattern in a website design is strategically planted to encourage users to interact and take action on the website due to heavy persuasion or delusional promises.

Different Types of Deceptive Design Danger Patterns

• Concealing Costs

At times, businesses only highlight a part of the total cost to the users from the start to encourage them to purchase. However, additional costs are added to the total value when the user reaches the checkout window. 

In such cases, the chances of a user completing the purchase are higher.

• Misdirection

Another deceptive design pattern is hiding important information regarding a product or service by incorporating creative visual elements. 

In most cases, this misdirection technique showcases the less critical information as part of a manipulation trick to convince the user to agree or grant access to personal information, recurring subscriptions, etc.

• Forced Continuity

Businesses implement many different ways to keep users attached to their websites. This forced continuity technique commonly includes difficult membership cancellation, tedious account deactivation, or money debits from the account. 

Due to this, a user is forced to stay active and interact with the website.

• Confirmshaming

Targeting the emotional aspect of human psychology is another dark pattern called confirmshaming. In this, businesses play around with the language content showcased when users decide to unsubscribe, abandon their cart, deactivate their account, etc.

 This instils shame in the users, convincing them to stay back in most cases.

• Creating a Sense Of Scarcity

Overestimating product purchases or service enrolments to create a sense of scarcity amongst users is a popular dark pattern in web design. 

For this deceptive design technique, businesses highlight elements like limited pieces remaining, the last few available slots, stock running low, lowest price ever, etc. This forces users to purchase without thinking twice, as they fear missing out.

• Trick Questions

Most users have a set scrolling pattern where their brain observes commonly asked questions so that they can answer quickly for every website. 

Businesses incorporate tricky questions based on the answer patterns, resulting in users agreeing to things without understanding to take advantage of this. 

Ways to Avoid Deceptive Design Danger Patterns

• An effective way to avoid deceptive design danger patterns is to promote complete transparency between the users and the website content.
• The next trip to avoid dark patterns is properly designing and placing all the website content clearly to indicate the user’s choices and decisions.
• Refrain from obtaining payment details from the get-go. Instead, build a trusting relationship with the user by offering multiple payment options or subscription plans to encourage them to purchase.

Conclusion

As a business providing products or services to users, cashing on various deceptive design danger patterns by playing with user psychology is not a good practice. 

Any website designer must avoid incorporating deceptive design patterns into the web design to ensure the users are not kept in the dark. An honest business is far better than a deceiving one, so choose a web design company wisely.