The latest edition of A List Apart has come out, and one of the articles, Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design, is a particularly stimulating read. Articles that discuss how to do cool things are pretty common, but ones that discuss if we should do them? They’re rather rarer. Thankfully this article gives us a chance to plumb these less-explored depths.
I don’t want to just rehash the content of the article, but I’ll give a quick overview. Dark patterns (which are also being gathered here) are basically using our skills to decieve our users and trick them into signing up for something, or even paying for something they didn’t intend to. These are rather extreme examples though; very clearly “bad”. But what about having users signing up for a newsletter by default when they check out, with the option to opt out? Is that wrong?
Thankfully, the article doesn’t treat this as a black-and-white issue. There are plenty of situations of lighter or darker grey, and the article does a good job of exploring them.
Personally, I hope that the article, or ones like it, might spawn a more generalized discussion of ethics in the web development community. If the field is to become a full fledged profession, we could do well to work for a generally agreed-upon set of ethical guidelines. I don’t think that we’d ever have anything like the AMA’s or the Bar’s ethical boards, and we probably don’t need it.
That being said, with every day the web becomes a bigger and bigger piece of our economy, and our lives. If we’re designing the pages and apps where people buy and sell, learn and grow, then we need to recognize that we’ve been given power of a sort. With such power comes responsibility, and we if we ignore it, we do so at our, and society’s, detriment.
Be good.
