Blog

Dark Patterns

· Michael Angeles

Harry Brignull's Dark Patterns is a pattern library dedicated to user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. He describes the site he created to address this issue:

Dark Patterns ... are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind. The purpose of this site is to catalogue various common types of Dark Pattern, and to name and shame organizations that use them.

Harry's talk at UX Brighton 2010 illustrates examples of brands that are using dark patterns including opting customers in to options they didn't explicitly choose, and adding items to their shopping carts. The talk calls for a code of ethics among professionals in the user interface design industries, and for professional associations to acknowledge that these practices are unethical. This does seem to me as simple a principle as a professional and professional association could adopt, in keeping with the familiar phrase from the principle of ethics for Medicine, "First, do no harm."

http://darkpatterns.org/

Travis Isaacs Demonstrates the Keynote Wireframe Toolkit

· Michael Angeles

If you're curious about Keynote prototyping, Travis Isaacs' describes how he works with the presentation software to produce click-through prototypes. As Travis notes, it's even useful to people who like to go between a low-fidelity wireframe created in another application to interactive demonstrations.

Keynote Kung-Fu: How to wireframe like a ninja

You can purchase Travis' Keynote Wireframe Toolkit here on Konigi.

//konigi.com/store/product/keynote-wireframe-toolkit

WhatUsersDo.com Review on 90 Percent of Everything

· Michael Angeles

Harry Brignull did a thorough review of WhatUsersDo.com, a UK-based remote, unmoderated, qualitative usability testing service. To use the service, you pay £25-£30 per participant and you get back screen recordings with audio of them thinking aloud during the tasks. The test participants are chosen from a pool of users paid to take usability tests, similar to usertesting.com.

As Brignull notes, this is possibly valuable to companies with little experience doing usability testing on their own before, but is less likely to be of value to companies with the experience and budget for doing moderated usability research on their own, or with a usability research consultancy.

http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2010/08/03/reviewing-whatusersdo-com-a-uk-based-remote-unmoderated-qualitative-usability-testing-platform/