Dark Pattern En

There’s a category of design techniques that exists specifically to get users to take actions they wouldn’t have chosen if they had clearly understood what was going on. They’re called dark patterns, and they’re more widespread than most people realize, even on sites belonging to well-known, seemingly trustworthy companies.

This article isn’t a guide on how to use them. It’s the opposite: it’s an explanation of what they are, how to recognize them, and why a serious agency should categorically refuse to implement them, even when a client explicitly asks for them believing they’ll boost conversions in the short term.

What dark patterns really are

A dark pattern is an interface deliberately designed to confuse, deceive, or push the user toward an action that isn’t in their interest: signing up for something they didn’t want, spending more than they intended, sharing data they’d have preferred to keep private, or making it nearly impossible to undo a decision made by mistake.

The term was coined in 2010 by British designer Harry Brignull, who also founded the first public archive of real-world examples. Since then, academic and regulatory research on the topic has grown considerably, to the point that some jurisdictions, including the European Union with the Digital Services Act, have started explicitly legislating against some of these practices.

What distinguishes a dark pattern from a simple, aggressive-but-legitimate design choice is the intentionality of the deception. A design that pushes users toward a premium option by displaying it more prominently is normal marketing. A design that deliberately hides the decline button, or that uses ambiguous language to make the user believe they’re doing one thing when they’re actually doing another, is a dark pattern.

The 6 most common dark patterns on websites

Forced cookie consent

The banner shows a big, colorful “Accept all” button and tucks away the reject option in a small, gray link, or behind more clicks than necessary. It’s so widespread that many people consider it normal, but it’s exactly the kind of asymmetry that European privacy regulation explicitly bans: rejecting should be just as easy as accepting.

Easy sign-up, impossible cancellation

Signing up for a service takes one click. Canceling requires finding a hidden option buried in settings, often after having to contact customer service or click through multiple screens designed to make you give up. The principle of equivalence should always apply: if getting in is easy, getting out should be just as easy.

Costs hidden until the last step

The price shown while browsing doesn’t include taxes, shipping, or fees, which only appear at the very last step of checkout, once the user has already invested time in the process and is psychologically less inclined to abandon it. This technique even has a technical name, drip pricing, and it has been the subject of legal action in several countries.

The fake countdown timer

A timer that reads “offer expires in 10 minutes” but resets every time the user reloads the page or comes back the next day. It creates artificial urgency based on false information, and it’s probably the easiest dark pattern for a sufficiently attentive user to spot, which undermines the credibility of the entire brand once discovered.

Programmed shame, known in English as confirmshaming

The button to decline an offer is worded to make whoever clicks it feel guilty: instead of “No thanks,” it reads “No, I’d rather pay full price” or “No, I’m not interested in saving money.” It’s a minimal but real form of psychological manipulation, and it implicitly communicates that the brand doesn’t respect the intelligence of the people visiting the site.

The pre-checked cart

Additional products or services, often insurance or add-on subscriptions, are automatically added to the cart, and the user has to notice them and actively remove them instead of consciously choosing to add them. It’s technically different from unsolicited consent, but it produces the same result: a purchase the user never really chose.

Why dark patterns seem to work (and why they don’t really)

In the short term, some dark patterns do actually produce an increase in specific metrics: more sign-ups, more conversions, fewer immediate cancellations. That’s exactly why they keep being used, despite being harmful.

The problem is that these short-term gains come with a cost that shows up later and is rarely traced back correctly to its cause. A 2019 Princeton University study, among the first to systematically analyze dark patterns on a large scale, found these techniques on over 10% of the e-commerce sites examined, a figure that shows just how structural the problem already was even before recent regulatory attention.

Users who feel deceived don’t come back. Worse, they talk about it. In a market where online reviews and digital word-of-mouth carry enormous weight in purchasing decisions, an experience perceived as manipulative causes reputational damage that far outweighs the gain from a single forced conversion.

There’s also a concrete and growing legal risk. European regulation, with the Digital Services Act and the European Commission’s guidelines on dark patterns published in recent years, is defining with increasing precision which practices are prohibited. A company implementing these techniques today is exposing itself to a regulatory risk that grows year after year.

How to design honestly without losing effectiveness

The good news is that designing without dark patterns doesn’t mean designing without persuasion. There’s a clear difference between guiding a user toward a choice with clarity and transparency, and forcing them into that choice by hiding information or alternatives.

Honest design makes it equally easy to accept or decline an offer. It communicates the full price from the very start of the journey, with no surprises at the last step. It uses urgency only when it’s real, never simulated. It allows users to cancel or unsubscribe just as easily as they signed up. And it doesn’t make decisions on the user’s behalf through pre-checked boxes for things they never actively chose.

This approach produces higher-quality conversions: customers who made a conscious choice, who come back because they trust you, and who become a source of genuine recommendations instead of negative reviews written after feeling deceived.

To dive deeper into how an interface’s structure influences user decisions in a transparent way, read our article on UI/UX design for SMEs. To understand how these principles apply starting from a site’s very first page, read our guide on how to design a homepage that sells.

Trust is an asset you can only build once

A dark pattern can work exactly once per user. After the first experience of being deceived, that person becomes more cautious, more alert, less willing to trust. And trust, online more than anywhere else, is the foundation on which every lasting business relationship is built.

At Sabriel Agency, we don’t implement dark patterns in any project, regardless of how much a client believes they might boost conversions in the short term. It’s not just an ethical stance: it’s a strategic choice, because a company built on transparent relationships with its customers lasts longer than one built on tricks that sooner or later get found out.