Dark Patterns Explained: Definition and Examples

Imagine you want to cancel a streaming subscription. In the app, all you find is “Manage subscription,” then a gray link labeled “More options,” followed by three pages of discount offers, and finally a button that says “I’ll give up my benefits.” Signing up took two clicks. Canceling takes ten minutes and a lot of patience.

Explained simply

Dark patterns are design tricks that push people into decisions they don’t really want to make. They exploit well-known mental shortcuts, such as the fact that we rarely change default settings or that we look less carefully when we’re under time pressure. Think of a supermarket that deliberately hides the exit behind the candy aisle and prints the exit signs small and faded.

British UX designer Harry Brignull coined the term in 2010 and published a collection of examples. Today he calls them deceptive patterns. Both terms mean the same thing.

Common types

Some patterns show up especially often:

Hidden costs: Fees only appear in the last step of checkout.
Hard to cancel: Signing up is quick, but leaving takes you through a maze.
Preselected add-ons: Insurance or a newsletter is already checked.
Fake urgency: Countdowns or messages like “Only 1 room left” with nothing real behind them.
Confirmshaming: The decline button says something like “No thanks, I prefer paying more.”

How widespread these tricks are became clear in a 2019 study by a team led by Arunesh Mathur at Princeton University. They crawled around 11,000 shopping websites and found 1,818 instances of dark patterns. For more examples and countermeasures, read Spotting and Avoiding Dark Patterns: Why Interface Tricks Cost You.

What the law says

There’s currently no single EU law that bans all dark patterns. Several rules apply in different places, though. Article 25 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) prohibits online platforms from designing their interfaces in ways that deceive or manipulate people. However, it only applies where the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive or the GDPR don’t already cover the practice. For cookies and tracking, data protection law and the EU cookie rules require freely given consent. In late 2021, the French data protection authority CNIL fined Google and Facebook because rejecting cookies on their sites took more effort than accepting them. In Germany, Section 312k of the German Civil Code (BGB) has required a clearly legible, easy-to-reach cancellation button for many online subscriptions since July 2022. The European Commission has also announced a Digital Fairness Act intended to address dark patterns more directly. As of October 2026, it hasn’t been adopted. This overview isn’t legal advice.

An example

Here’s an example. An online store asks at checkout, “Don’t want to miss any deals?” with the box already checked. Many people only realize later that they’ve signed up for the newsletter, and they unsubscribe in frustration.

After the redesign, the box is unchecked and clearly labeled: “Yes, send me the newsletter (unsubscribe anytime).” Fewer people sign up, but the ones who do actually read the emails.

In practice

Make the exit as easy as the entrance. Canceling, unsubscribing, and declining shouldn’t take more steps than agreeing.
Keep the wording neutral. Label options factually and as equals. Good microcopy explains instead of applying pressure.
Question your metrics. If a test only measures short-term clicks, the tricks will easily win. Keep an eye on cancellations, complaints, and returns as well.

Related terms

Microcopy, Mental Model, A/B Testing

Dark Patterns