Buying Online? Beware Of these deceptive patterns

Deceptive prompts in apps—ways to coerce people into spending more time or money—are on the rise. Here's how to identify them

- Ivan Mehta

Raise your hand if you have encountered a dialog box on an app or a website where "yes" is brighter and more visible than "no", or the site you are buying from has sneakily added a new service or item while charging you more money.

These traits, called deceptive patterns, are design decisions made by companies to subconsciously coerce users into making a decision, making a purchase, or ticking a box. Essentially, these are sneaky design tactics that online platforms use to nudge you into doing things you didn't plan on.

Although we may not be aware of the terminology, most of us have experienced this phenomenon. "Recently, the landing page of a dining app showed me discounts at a restaurant I was at, but when I went on to pay the bill, I saw that the discount was only applicable to card holders of certain banks. This whole rigmarole just wasted my time and made me not trust the app," says Radhika Modi, a Delhi-based gender expert.

This kind of trickery is rampant in India. To highlight this behaviour, Bengaluru-based design agency Parallel partnered with The Advertising Standards Council Of India (ASCI) to study over 12,000 screenshots across more than 50 apps from nine different industries.

The study found that 52 out of 53 apps have at least one deceptive pattern. Health-tech apps were found to have the highest usage of dark patterns, followed by those in the travel booking and fintech sectors. Privacy Deception, which is tricking users into sharing more personal data than they should, and Drip Pricing, which is a pattern of slowly revealing the additional fees for a service or a product, were the most prominent patterns found in these apps.