Humans are now very reliant on different kind of software, whether for productivity, entertainment, education or other purposes. This has led to the IT industry being one of the biggest industries in terms of growth globally. However, much of the growth is funded and fuelled by designs that intentionally prey upon the user.
These designs are called dark patterns, and they are adopted and integrated in order to best extract certain values from the user – whether it is your attention span, personal data, time or money. There are a vast variety of methods used, and often they involve carefully optimised designs, spanning multiple fields of study and preying on the all-too-fallible human nature. As such, they are often difficult to spot by any single individual, let alone completely avoid.
When more and more time is spent on the online world, without careful recognition, we can easily fall into the traps laid by professionals who have spent their careers perfecting their skills and methods. Therefore, it will be prudent for us to learn of the methods websites and applications adopt to take advantage of human nature, to recognise them and avoid falling into them.