UX Dark Design Patterns — Bait & Switch

Bait & Switch: You set out to do one thing, but a different, undesirable thing happens instead.

Bait and switch is a well known shady sales tactic that consists of a sales representative offering customers a desirable item at an affordable price point (the bait) only to but later give the customer a less desirable deal at the end (the switch).

Bait and Switch is not only used in sales, unfortunatly you will find it in design as well. So let’s look at an example of how bait and switch is being used in design.

When scrolling Reddit’s feed, the user can expand the images displayed by clicking on them. However, Reddit’s feed has lots of “promoted” posts, which are actually ads. The user is tricked into clicking on the ad’s image, but instead of the default expanding behavior, the user is automatically redirected to some ad website.

So why are companies use these tactics? One reason is they are trying to adhere to the wrong KPIs. For example, if the marketing team defines “success” as the number of newsletter signups, then marketing managers will go to great lengths to increase the number of signups without considering long-term consequences to the user experience. While these tactics might produce the desired results in the short term, you risk upsetting users in the long-term. It’s great that you got the user to signup, but what’s more important, a loyal long-term user or hitting that short-term KPI.

As designers, it’s our responsibility to push back when we’re asked to use dark design patterns. Stakeholders need to understand that you need to be honest and transparent about what actions you’re asking the user to take and explain the value for them of doing it.