Harry Brignull is a British user-experience designer who in 2010 registered a website to catalogue interface designs that trick users into doing things they did not intend. He called them dark patterns; the term is now also rendered as deceptive patterns and appears in legislation.
The catalogue is specific. Roach motel: easy to get into, hard to get out of. Confirmshaming: making the decline option humiliating — no thanks, I don't want to save money. Misdirection: visual emphasis steering the eye to the profitable option. Sneak into basket. Hidden costs revealed at the final step. Privacy Zuckering. Trick questions. Forced continuity after a free trial. Disguised advertisements.
None of these contain a false statement. That is their defining property and the reason they are difficult to regulate.
The mechanisms they exploit are among the best established in cognitive psychology.
Satisficing. Herbert Simon's finding that people do not optimize; they accept the first option that meets a threshold, because full evaluation is expensive. An interface that places an acceptable-looking option in the path of least resistance will capture most users.
Defaults as recommendations. Johnson and Goldstein's work on organ donation registration showed enormous differences in participation between opt-in and opt-out countries, from single digits to over ninety percent, with no difference in underlying attitudes. A default is read as an implicit recommendation from the designer, and changing it costs effort.
And effort discounting. Adding steps to a process does not merely delay it; it converts a proportion of intentions into abandonments, and the proportion is large. This is why cancellation flows are long.
The FTC's complaint against Amazon on 21 June 2023 alleges both halves. It describes enrolment in Prime through flows that did not clearly disclose that a subscription was being purchased, and a cancellation process that the company internally called Iliad — a name chosen, the complaint notes, for the long and difficult journey.
The complaint's framing is what makes this chapter matter. The allegation is not that Amazon said anything untrue. It is that the geometry of the interface produced outcomes the users did not intend and would not have chosen, which is a claim about design rather than about speech.
Cross-ref: Attack — Engineer the Default