Designers constantly juggle the challenge of balancing user-centric design with business goals. While good UX focuses on creating seamless, intuitive experiences, Deceptive UX emerges when those same skills are utilized to manipulate user behavior.
Tactics like hidden fees, misleading buttons, subscription traps, and infinite scrolling guide users toward unintended actions to maximize engagement and profit. These practices flourish in a capitalist system where platforms compete to extract the most value from user behavior.
Although companies justify Deceptive UX as necessary to achieve business objectives, these tactics produce associated costs. The erosion of user trust and increasing frustration often emerge, causing platforms to engage in a cycle of short-term gains and long-term losses. Deceptive practices invite regulatory intervention, leading to patchwork fixes that frequently spawn new manipulative tactics.
This vicious cycle feels unsustainable, prompting an unsettling question: What if attempts to fix Deceptive UX are destined to fail?
