Dussehra is done with and Diwali is ahead. Before, within and in between these two festivals, India buys up the goodies it loves. Even as the Dussehra sales close, online marketplace sales have touched a record `55,000 crore ($6.5 billion) in one week. Even as the Diwali festive season begins and the card parties start, a whole market of buyers and sellers is ecstatic and ready to buy and sell even more.
India’s online retail market is today all of $75 billion in value. As online retailers and their close cousins in direct-to-consumer e-commerce (D2C players) celebrate and prepare to sell more during their Diwali sales, I look at the consumer side of dynamics and peek at a rather concerning soft-underbelly issue of e-commerce and the virtual format of selling and buying. Harry Brignull, a London-based user-experience (UX) designer calls it a ‘dark pattern’.
E-commerce dark patterns are really bad practices purposely ingrained into websites we buy from. Brignull calls it out to be “deceptive practices carefully crafted to trick users into doing things not in their interest”. These are scientifically crafted UX tricks that seek to gain at your expense. Must you watch out for these, even as you participate in the buying frenzy that has just closed and is equally about to unfold ahead?
For a start, let me call a spade a spade. When you buy on an e-commerce platform, you give a lot. You pay with your time, money, and equally your privacy. The data you leave on the platform is something that gets to become footsteps you have left behind that will be followed to make you buy more. The important point to insist on is that you want to be responsibly used. You are being used as a customer, but you want it to be done with responsibility and with least irritation, aggression, deceit and the marketing UX lie.
Let me take you through a short journey of the dark patterns a typical and irresponsible e-commerce platform would indulge in. Thankfully, we have a few responsible players who avoid it all.
The big one is what I call the ‘buffet effect’. A typical 24-course buffet has a whole host of goodies laid out with a method to the layout’s madness. You have a salad counter, a cheese layout, starters, the live counter where the dish is put together in front of you, the main course and a most deliciously placed dessert counter.
When you hit the buffet, there are two types of people. The minority set is one that goes about with a method, picking things carefully, at times the salad and cheese first. Once done, the attack is on the live counter. And then comes the starter-platter and finally if you have the space, the main-course. The dessert is of course never missed.
At a recent sales conference at a 5-star hotel, I took my plate and just hovered around the buffet surreptitiously till the 62 in the group had taken their first helping. The result: Only three did what I just explained. The rest did the nasty.
The plates were loaded with everything in one go, except the dessert (even though I spotted two add that as well to the overloaded plate). And big heaps of everything. The lunch break meant a long queue of 62. The buffet-goers wanted it all at once, without the effort of walking back and forth again and again. And when most heap their plates, it is with an irrational feel of wanting to try everything on offer, and not miss out on anything. The quantities taken are also not well thought out. If you actually look at what’s leftover on the plate at the end, a typical restaurant buffet has a wastage of anything between 3 and 23 percent of eatable food by volume.
I take this buffet tale as an analogy to what happens at some e-commerce sites. The site lures you with the array on offer. You are taken through every item with a method to the madness. The most premium offering that makes the most in terms of margins need not necessarily be at the top of the heap displayed. It can be displayed right in the middle between the ostensibly most expensive and the ostensibly cheapest. The clever idea is to make you land up in the middle and buy that one item cleverly placed. This is a dark pattern for sure.
There is a method to the way things are placed on an e-commerce site. There is a method in the colour used to code prices, the fonts, and literally everything else. Behind it all is a UX-designer, a UX-sociologist, a UX-psychologist, a UX-statistician, and many other UX consumer scientists who are planning it all at the back-end.
Unlike the prepaid buffet counter, at the e-commerce platform, you pay as you go. The idea of the buffet organiser here (the e-commerce portal in this case) is to make you see the array and pick what the portal wants you to. There is more margin in some and less in others. The objective of the e-commerce platform is to maximise it all. The dark pattern players are those who are doing this scientifically at the back-end. In a way you are being played with. And that is a dark pattern practice.
There are many such ploys. Among the big ones are the ‘trunk sale effect’. Out here, the feeling is that stock is running out. The trunk will be opened once. Those who line up and pick first get the best. Get to the buffet and pick the best pieces of chicken from the chicken curry. Those who come later will only get the gravy and the bad pieces.
Limited colours, the last few pieces (listed in numbers), the recently bought numbers listed alongside, the bait-and-switch approach where you are baited by a big offer, but when you go to buy it, you are told it is sold out. Instead, you are offered another item with a smaller discount. The ‘discount shaming’ lines where you are asked to click a box that says, “I will miss this offer”, or an even worse, “I don’t want this discount”. The hidden extra fee at checkout, the ‘nagging’ messages in your remarketing mailbox, are all pieces of dark patterns we are exposed to.
Let’s watch out then as we go in and buy. Let the buyer beware. On a more responsible note, may we ask our e-commerce portals to proudly display a “No Dark Patterns used in our UX” sign to make it more comfortable to hang at your website?
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru & Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(Views are personal)
(harishbijoor@hotmail.com)
