hello ello ello it's lovely to see youall and yes I'm the second British person to today this is probably thelast time you're going to see us in Europe but enjoy it while it lasts rightum is everybody ready for a good rant I like a good moan don't you one of thethings that it's frustrating me most about the web these days is darkpatterns right and we've all experienced dark pants but just in case you're notfamiliar with the term dark patterns a user interface elements that have beencarefully crafted to trick you into doing things that you might nototherwise do usually using psychological manipulation right does everybody knowthe kind of thing I mean yeah right so we're talking about things like this onEtsy where it goes it's almost gone there's only one item left right welleverything on Etsy is single items isn't it as a whole point at the platform itsays right there handmade item there is only going to be one right and thenthree people are looking at the cart right now you don't act it's all gonnago horribly wrong I hate this kind of stuff and it really annoys me but it'sreally easy if you ever want to design with manipulation in mind it's so simplecheck out this design that I mocked up I'm selling people insurance with theirshoes because you want insurance when you buy a pair of shoes don't you andI've done it very easily I'm not I'm not lying I'm not doing anything like thatbut basically I put two buttons at the bottom we've got this button that saysadd to basket without insurance and this one that says add to basket withinsurance it's clearly labeled isn't it right it's not my fault if people arestupid and click the bright green button that points onwards really that's a darkpattern in action but the trouble is is we kind of all know they're dirty don'twe yeah right um you feel like you won't have towash your hands after every time you do a dark pattern but you're often bouncedinto it aren't you you told you how to do it by seniormanagement and I've got a problem with articles like this right doc patentdesign is unethical and irresponsible right there it's entirely right it's notwrong I'm not claiming that this is wrong but just arguing about ethics isvery difficult when you're talking to your marketing manager who has to raiseconversion rates by the end of the year if he doesn't want to get fired righthe's gonna interpret those ethics as completely ethical after all that shoeone that I showed you let people buy it without the insurance ethics is how youdecide to interpret it in your own mind at that moment right or wrong so wecan't just make an ethical argument if we want to convince other people thatand dark pants are a bad idea so what I want to do is I want to look at threebusiness reasons solid business reasons against dark pants and then I want to isno point of just slagging off dark patterns and saying they're wrong wethen need to give an alternative so I'm going to share with you threealternatives to dark pants but let's start with looking at the three businessreasons why dark patterns suck and we shouldn't be using them reason numberone consumers are cynical they're savvy and they're spoilt for choice the worldwe live in now isn't the world of Mad Men right where consumers were a littlebit kind of naive and gullible and didn't have a much choice anyway if youput your message in front of them enough and you said it loud enough and longenough then people would believe you that's not the world we live in anymorenot only is every one of your competitors just to click away but theyknow what you're doing who's ever booked all are down booking calm right we'veall done it and we're all booked up booked a hotel on booking.
comagain you come away feeling like you've just been conned buying you a usedsalesman right for a used car you know that something a bit suspicious went onthere right you can't put your finger on it but when you see things like only sixrooms left will expire in 11 hours 21 other people looking at this page eventhough you know what's happening you go into panic mode your caveman brainsgoing I must hoard this room right and of course they know it but you knowwhat's happening don't you and you might think I'm a designer of course of courseI know I'm so much more educated than the masses right but it's actually nottrue I've done usability testing on booking.
com because I'm a country buggerand I like to find out stuff and this is one real quote I hate all thismanipulative crap trying to convince me the room is about to sell out I justignore that stuff there is a huge presumption that because dark patternswork people aren't aware that their dark patterns but that's not truedark patterns work on a subconscious level but that doesn't mean we can't beaware of them on a conscious level so yes if you use dark patterns you willsee an increasing conversion rate but just be aware that people know thatyou're manipulating them okay and that opens up all kinds of problems becauseif people know that you're manipulating them why don't they just go somewhereelse now booking.
com I asked that I asked afollow-up question which is why do you continue to use booking.
com then and theanswer is well it's really easy to use other than that right so they continueto get repeat business on my very little study admittedly based purely on theusability of their site it's the usability that overcomes thecrappiness of the dark pattern so be very careful because you will reducerepeat business and also governments to start getting involved you know it'sblindingly obvious if governments are beginning to get involved right if theyrealize there's a problem then everybody knows there's a problem so in the UKthere's a group called the CMA that have taken enforcement action to bring an endto misleading sales tactics especially on hotel booking sites right they mightas well as set booking.
com okay so this isn't going to last foreverthis dark patterns working governments are going to get involved consumers arebecoming more savvy and more cynical and the trouble is is one just onedisgruntled customer can completely undermine your brand so take for examplethe story of hashey Cameron but his name now it's gone outof my head this guy right so a guy guy guy's father lost his luggage hisluggage got lost and his son decided that he was gonna you know get theluggage back for his dad he went through all the process it was a nightmareBritish Airways was useless he got more and more frustrated and the endutter frustration he took out Promoted Tweet so anytime somebody typed inBritish Airways they got a message back saying don't fly British Airways theircustomer service is horrendous one disgruntled customer then got picked upby Mashable and TechCrunch and then the next day got picked up by the BBC TheGuardian The Telegraph and they came back in British Airways staff came backin on Monday morning this happened over a weekend and they had a major PRdisaster because of one pissed off customer so when the customer has thatmuch power let's put this together we're saying that they are aware that you'reusing dark patterns and they've got the power to screw your brand over suddenlyit's not looking like such a good idea is it but and then when lots of peopleget together it really hits the fan right well that's when Facebook ishaving to apologize for doing psychological experiments on usersand it becomes this massive issue our governments get involved it's a reallydangerous business but probably the biggest single reasonfor not using dark patterns is buyer's remorse have you ever done that if youever bought something and then gone now that was a bad idea of course we allhave own way and so it's for a variety of different reasons but sometimes itbecause you you were kind of bounced into that cell you were bounced intobuying that thing now a lot of businesses have the attitude what Idon't care those we've made the sale what does itmatter that the person is unhappy but it does matter hugely partly because theyturn around and slag you off online but there are other reasons as well thereare actually some real hidden costs that you can be totally unaware of so forexample your UX team is beavering away and actually it's doing great hey we'vemanaged to increase the conversion rate in the last quarter by having annoyingpop-up overlays and you know bait-and-switch and all of these otherthings aren't we doing well la jara meanwhile in the rest of the companyunbeknownst to their UX team things are kicking off majorly so you've got amarketing that's suddenly a finding that they're having to spend more money toget the same results from their marketing budget now they don't reallyknow why that is suddenly it seems to be much harder to persuade people to buywell it's because they're having to spend advertising budget and undoing allthe negative PR that's going on around your brand so there's an increasedmarketing cost that comes from dark pants meanwhile the support Center isgetting this huge number of calls that it didn't have before wouldn't angrierand angrier customers right every time somebody rings a call center in the UKit costs an average of 3 pounds and 21 pence for every customer right I onceworked with a custom company who sold kettles rightand they decided to do that sneaky thing where you add something to people'sshopping basket without telling them right so you add a kettle to the basketand it also added a load of filters right the expensive on-brand filtersright and so people and sure enough they solda lot more filters who would know but what they weren't aware of is thatpeople were calling the support line and moaning about it now the filters cost topound 50 and the support call cost 3 pound 20 they were losing money soyou've got to think about the broader impact across the business and then theother examples returns processing returns is massively expensive andcomplicated and time-consuming you're having to deal with calls and emails andpostage and packaging you know processing those incoming onesworking out which ones can be resold which ones have to be restocked whichones just have to be discarded it's an expensive and time-consuming business sothe last thing we want is unhappy customers unhappy customers cost ourbusiness so I hope there you can see three solid business reasons why darkpatterns are bad but we can't stop there because if you're mr.
mr.
marketing leadwho has to get his results just saying all these bad things are gonna happenhe's gonna go I don't care I just care about my target what all I've got toachieve okay so we point out the bigger business problems with dark pants butthen we need to go on and offer alternatives so what are ouralternatives actually there are so many there are so many other things we can dothings that are far more effective than just doing putting things in people'sshopping basket or scaring them that the that sells might run out but I'm justgoing to focus on three because I was gonna go I was goingfocus on three I need an extra finger there um we're going to look at three init because we don't have that long number one is you want to address peaceof people's objections and reduce their risks you see we've got this thingcalled the primal brain right and it's the fight and flight part of our brainand it's always looking out for dangers and risks so even something as simple asa newsletter signup form kicks the primal brain into action and it startspanicking and it starts looking for danger you know what if they sell myemail address to third parties what if the contents rubbish what if it's hardto unsubscribe what if they send me too many emails what if they pressure meinto buying what do I get hacked right and it kicks off this train ofsubconscious thoughts that puts us off of taking action so we've got to addressthese objections and these risks very clearly in our user interfaces we don'twant to avoid them all right we don't to avoid those risks we've all heard therumors about McDonald's and we write about the chicken nuggets not havingnecessarily the nicest pieces of a chicken in right or that the fries don'tactually contain potato and these various rumors that fly around now thetrouble is McDonald's could sit there going I hope no one realizes I hope noone realizes I hope no one realizes oh I hope and we're not gonna mention thatbecause if we mention that it's just gonna spread the rumor right it's gonnabring more attention to it but actually good for them they address itthey actually address these objections head-on there they don't say we knowwhat you're thinking you think that chicken nuggets are made up of chickenstesticles right they don't go that far but what they do do is they say thingslike it always contains a hundred percent chicken breast meat why do theyfeel a need to point that out they feel the need to point out because they knowthe rumors they know what people say about their brand they know theobjections people have to buying their products so what are the objectionspeople have that stopped them buying your products do you know if you don'tknow run they find out also don't make peoplesearch for the answers to these questions so a great example is anewsletter signup form again right so people are worried about privacy andsecurity and what you're gonna do be their data and all that kind of stuff soyou're signing up for a newsletter right you get to the newsletter form this willgo through your head and then what you got do if you want to answer thosequestions on most sites you have to scroll all the way down to the patan andsearch for that tiny link that says privacy policy which you then clickthrough to and don't understand a word that's written there because it's allwritten in legalese right on my website I put that I will never share your emailaddress message right next to the forum so that people don't have to search forfor answers to these objections and you also wherever possible you want to givea user a sense of control in what they're doing they control the riskcontrol the perceived danger because that will reassure them so there's twoways you can do that don't leave me wondering about what'shappening communicate to me regularly inform me about what's going on but alsolet me undo I miss any mistakes that I make for example can I return an item oreasily cancel a subscription that gives me a sense of control it reassures me itencourages me to take action number to defeat cognitive load one of the bigproblems one of the big reasons that people fail to act on our website isbecause they don't notice the things they need to notice in order to beconvinced and to act they don't see the call-to-action button and cognitive loadyou now has huge consequences if we're feeling stressed if we're feelingharassed if we're feeling I'm overwhelmed everything feels like hardwork it feels unfamiliar and confusing it feels untrue and it makes us feel badit puts us in a bad mood and that is ironic considering when we get in a badmood our cognitive load goes up even further and so we get into this loop butit's not just bad mood that makes our cognitive load high confusing instern interface displays you know where things move around or change or aren'twhere they expected to be and also where we don't conform to to kind ofconventions so the search box isn't in the top right hand corner or you knowyou've got weird and wacky layout it will confuse people and overwhelm themfortunately you can deal with cognitive load simply by simplifying yourinterface I go through every single element on a page right when I'moptimizing conversion and I asked myself three questions about every singleelement on the page I asked myself can I remove this what would happen if Iremoved it will it undermine sounds or would it actually just remove clutter ifan item isn't specifically helping conversion then it's harming it if Ican't remove an item because it would be damaging for whatever reason I askmyself what could I hide this can I put it under an accordion or a tab can Imove it deeper in the information architecture if I can't do that forwhatever reason maybe I'm legally required to keep that content on thepage then the next thing I do is I shrink it so that there's a strongvisual hierarchy where the most important elements are big and there areother things that are smaller seeing simplify and then use all kinds ofdesign tricks that you can do to make sure people see what you want them tosee I did this little mock-up to demonstrate it and there's a whole loadof things going on in here and I'll do it very quick for a start look at theirheadline and the line of text underneath it's creating a v-shape that's drawingyour attention to the shot now button the shop now button itself is acontrasting color it really stands out from the rest of the design but we'vealso got this habit of following people's eye lines look at this man downhere okay he's wearing a VR headset so wecan't actually see anything but the principle still stands if you follow hiseye line where does it go it goes to the shop now buttonlook at this guy's hand he's actually friggin pointing at the shop buttonright but it doesn't need to be just people you use either there's otherthings that you could use you can use shapes andpatents and that kind of thing so if we look at this woman here and look at onthe back of her head what she got on the back of her head she's got an arrowthere and the arrow is pointing at the shop now button and then my piece de laresistance the real thing that makes you look at that button is it's got a womansbottom beside it and I don't care whether you're a man or a woman we areall pre-programmed to look at bottoms right so there's a lot of designdecisions that you can make that will draw people's eyes in the rightdirection but design is more than just bottoms I'msorry to break that to you it's also putting people in a good mood we wantpeople to be in a good mood so here's a screen capture from the SmashingMagazine website and they've got a membership program that they want to adoctrine ate you into signing up to it's actually a really good membershipprogram um but I am a non-executive director of specific magazines butwhat's really good about this is it's everything on it is designed to put youin a good mood it's designed to make you feel positive and the more positive youare the lower your cognitive load is the more you'll be able to see andconcentrate so we've got some great stuff going on here obviously we've gotthe very that we've got the animations with the cats and it's very smiley andpersonable and and upbeat we've got the vibrant colors that are really friendlyand and approachable on top of that we've got these lovely little design -lighters or rollover you know where it just moves a little bit and makes you gooh you know and then best of always there is the language so if you'rewilling to spend a whole massive $9 a month you get to be part of that I feelsmashing club write the copy reinforces it as well every element of that isdesigned to put you in a good mood you know the problem when it comes tocognitive load is we ask people to think about too many things simultaneouslyright sign up for a newsletter make a purchase follow me on social media sharethis what do you want me to do pick one and stick with it we're constantlyoverwhelming people with far too many options with far too many thingsthe final thing to wrap things up I want to encourage you to make it fastnow I know we've got a room primarily of designers in here but you know who canhave the most impact on conversion and that's developers so there are onlydevelopers in the room good for you you guys Rockas designers we never say that to you we say we hate you we say we talk about youall the time behind your back but you when it comes to increasing conversionyou are the heart and soul of things because speed matters and the next timea designer turns around to you and says I want these 28 web fonts right tellthem where to go let's look at how profound an impact conversion ratesorry performance has on the conversion rate right for every two seconds of loadtime you will lose 4.
3 percent of revenue per visitor right you will see a3.
8 percent reduction in clicks and a 1.
8 percent drop off in queriesperformance has a massive impact on your conversion rate 79% of such shopperswon't return to a slow loading web site and 44% of shoppers will share a badexperience with their friends that's not goodwe're not in a good position so how do we ensure our websites are fast and asdesigners we need to think about this well we can't just expect there thedevelopers to do some kind of magic you know they do some right and I sacrificea chicken or whatever they do we have to take responsibility too in this right sothere is ways we need to start thinking about performance first of all we needto speed up imagery we need to think about image compression right I'm sorryit's dull but we do we need to consider how big we're having images the amountof compression that we're applying to them even thewhat's in the images if it's a picture of it if I took a picture of you guysnow and put that online it would compress like crap because there's somuch detail going on also none of you young whippersnappers realized that readcompresses really badly right I had to worry about those things when we were on28k modems so image compression matters also using a content delivery networknow this is a bit more techie but it is worth considering and if you're um evenmy little blog runs on a content delivery network try using one of theseservices to see what your website looks like when it's been loaded fromAustralia it's like they live in the third world right for lots of reasonsbut partly because of performance also optimize your CSS and JavaScript rightwe need to make sure that we're using JavaScript lightly and and not relyingon it too heavily because it will slow performance down especially on mobiledevices and then finally watch those web fonts right be careful with your webfonts people don't get carried away so there you go that's that's basically allI want to share with you just to briefly recap that if my clicker has decided tostop working so what we're saying is that dark patterns are dangerous becauseconsumers are cynical customers can undermine your brand and mostimportantly buyer's remorse can be incredibly damaging and costly to yourbusiness and your alternative is to address users objections overcome theircognitive load and make it fast if you want to know more about this kind ofstuff I've put and learn more about conversion rate optimization then checkout that web address and you'll find hello more but for now thank you verymuch you.
