Dark Patterns in Ecommerce Subscription
User experience design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and delightful experiences for the users, but sometimes it’s not always all rainbows and sunshine. Instead of offering a fantastic experience, there’s a dark side of UX is doing the opposite to trick the consumers into a sale.
A dark pattern is a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills. Another more broad definition of a dark pattern is an instance where “user value is supplanted in favor of shareholder value.”
Imagine you’re trying to cancel a subscription from a company that provides the services you no longer interested in or needed.
Take ClassPass for example, if you would like to cancel your membership, which, when upon registration ClassPass states that you can do so at any time, you will then need to contact a customer service personnel, and spending several minutes in a chat with a salesperson before they finally cancel your subscription. If you’re ready to rejoin, there will be a reactivation fee.
A lot of us might have experienced this, the ‘Cancel Subscription’ button was so hard to find that you have to spend 10 minutes Googling it.
HelloFresh is a food delivery plan that supposed to let you opt-in and out of the service whenever you want. But when looking for membership cancellation, you might encounter a situation that the placement has changed over time and is always difficult to find.
Then, to make it worse, HelloFresh started to force the customers to talk to a sales rep in order to cancel a subscription.
Dark patterns have been around for as long as we can remember, these are just a few of many tactics of websites that have been designed to benefit them or put their needs first.
