

Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People  - jakarta
http://www.slideshare.net/harrybr/ux-brighton-dark-patterns?from=ss_embed

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qeorge
Accompanying website:

<http://darkpatterns.org/>

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minalecs
I wish they would of just linked to this site. as a side note, I hate slides
because I have no idea of the slides context in the presentation. Usually
during a presentation, a slide is only complementary to what the actual
presenter is saying, so why present just the slides. Also google indexes
slides so high in search. I've never found a any good content out of just
slides.

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jamesbritt
See previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511201>

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muhfuhkuh
I like how this talk on dark UI design is hosted on a site that tried to open
a pop-under ad (kudos to Chrome for not allowing suchness).

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mynameishere
Well, browsers have prevented that for years. More to the point, whatever
evils UI design is capable of are certainly being committed by that
catastrophically disarrayed mess of a website. Maybe a few more irrelevant
widgets, tactically-place banners, out-of-sync but identical flash movie ads,
and thumbnail-jammed iframes would do the trick...?

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andreyf
Is this ethical?

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/404957/donorschoose.png>

The opt-in is for an extra 15% of your donation to be "optionally" donated to
the charity. Because it is "optional", this 15% doesn't count towards the
official "% of donations used for operating expenses" metric used to gauge
charities, of course.

~~~
jacquesm
It's going to get their merchant account blocked if and when it reaches the
card companies.

Such 'stuffing' of charges is a long time trick used to push the total charge
volume so the chargebacks are reduced. Nobody is going to charge back $15 sent
to charity.

So 200 charges at 150, 2% chargeback rate, vs 400 charges, 200@135 and 200@15,
1% chargeback rate.

Some billing companies that have since gone under used to do this with a 1$
charge added to every sale.

This practice has been banned for years and I'm quite surprised to see it
revive.

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syntheticzero
I had to read and re-read this post before I grasped what you're trying to say
here. There is no "stuffing" of charges going on here, whatsoever. The donor's
credit card is only charged once, for the entire amount of the donation,
including optional operating expenses donation. If the donor donates to 10
proposals, it still results in only one credit card charge.

It just seems bizarre to me that, simply by looking at a screen shot of our
checkout cart, that you'd make some bizarre assumption that DonorsChoose is
doing what you describe. Come on, at least do some research before posting
things like this.

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jacquesm
One charge with two beneficiaries?

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syntheticzero
I don't know what you mean to imply with this question ---- when you donate to
any non-profit, the money might be spent on any number of things, including
overhead, as well as money sent on to beneficiaries. The only difference with
DonorsChoose is that we actually give donors a say in how we spend their
donation: on overhead, on materials sent to a specific classroom, or a
combination. (Donors can decide to send a donation specifically to cover
DonorsChoose overhead, in which case all the money goes into our general
fund). The donor may also decide to donate to more than one proposal --- it
could be two or three or five or ten proposals at once. That is also one
credit card charge.

I really don't see why you assume that because the money being donated is
spent on multiple things that would be separate credit card charges. That
makes no sense, who does that? I can't think of any e-commerce site either in
the commercial or non-profit space that would do this for no apparent reason.

I might add that, though I think this is more or less irrelevant, DonorsChoose
does not send the money directly to teachers, but instead purchases the
materials itself and has them shipped to the teachers (this is to reduce the
incidence of fraud, and to make sure the money is spent on the materials the
teacher said they would spend the money on --- the specific materials are
chosen by the teacher, but we actually do the purchasing). If a donor
specified all their donation go to the teacher and students, then the money
they donate goes only to the vendor(s) for that proposal, who then ship goods
to the teacher at their school, and the money we spend on staff expenses, web
hosting, etc., etc. has to come from donations earmarked for overhead
(including the optional donations).

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TamDenholm
There's a lot of HN posts about A/B testing, I'd love to see someone test out
these techniques and see just how much of a difference they make.

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kbatten
Is it ethical to link to facebook and require flash to show a few images?

