The Null Device

Dark Patterns is a list of deliberately deceptive or user-hostile website/interface design patterns, used by unscrupulous operators to deceive or exploit unwary users. These range from honest-but-hamfisted attempts to corral user behaviour into profitable channels (i.e., making it inconvenient to compare prices; sites which use JavaScript-based navigation to frustrate opening links in other windows do this) to various more underhanded tricks, ranging from sneaking unwanted items into shopping baskets, adding unsolicited recurring charges to spamming your friends under false pretexts to generally making it hard for the user to unsubscribe or do anything that reduces turnover. Featured offenders include the likes of Ryanair, various travel and consumer electronics retail sites, and Facebook (who get their own entry):

“The act of creating deliberately confusing jargon and user-interfaces which trick your users into sharing more info about themselves than they really want to.” (As defined by the EFF). The term “Zuckering” was suggested in an EFF article by Tim Jones on Facebook’s “Evil Interfaces”. It is, of course, named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

(via Boing Boing) ¶ deception design design patterns evil facebook ryanair web 0

Yahoo!'s Christian Crumlish posits the five principles of good social software design:

• Pave the Cowpaths
• Talk Like a Person
• Play Well with Others
• Learn from Games
• Respect the Ethical Dimension

Briefly, the Cargo Cult means imitating superficial features of successful websites and applications without really understanding what makes them work. Don't Break Email warns against the practice of using email as a one-way notification or broadcast medium while disabling your users' ability to hit reply as a normal response. The Password Anti-Pattern is the pernicious practice of asking users to give you their passwords on other systems so that you can import their data for them, thus training them to be loose and insecure with their private information. The Ex-Boyfriend Bug crops up when you try to leverage a user's social graph without realizing that some of the gaps in a person's network may be deliberate and not an up-sell opportunity. Lastly, a Potemkin Village is an overly elaborated set of empty community discussion areas or other collaborative spaces, created in anticipation of a thriving population rather than grown organically in response to their needs (see also Pave the Cowpaths).

(via Boing Boing) ¶ design design patterns fail social software 0

Dating Design Patterns, or, adapting object-oriented software design methodology to the task of picking up women (or, as the authors put it, "attempting to implement getLaid method successfully on FEMALE platform"); the "design patterns" have names like "Jini Singles Bar", "Pan-Dimensional Renaissance Differentiator" and "Reverse Polarity" (which sounds more like Star Trek than OOP).

Classic Method Call: The recommended parameters for Just Asking.

Structured Exposure, a.k.a. Container-Managed Dating: How to use commonly available dating containers to achieve maximum sessions with less time and effort and an array of services you don't have to write yourself.

Umm, OK... (via Slashdot; where else?)

¶ dating design patterns geek humour parody programming sex tech 0