Fighting Dark Patterns
Let me know if this week’s column about “dark patterns” resonates. Hit reply and tell me your story.
I’ve been feeling off lately. It shouldn’t be too surprising I guess. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I miss seeing my coworkers, especially the ones I don’t work with every day. And of course, election season is heating up (did the last one ever really end?), so there’s a feeling of constantly being in an ideological war zone. It’s exhausting.
I worry a bit about how all of this affects my work, if it’s casting a shadow on things as I go about my day-to-day, answering customer emails, doing work for my objectives & key results (OKRs), helping colleagues. Like I said, things just sort of feel off.
Photo by Chen YiChun on Unsplash
Here’s one example. We have an OKR this quarter on the support engineering team to improve our escalations to the product team. As part of this work, we want to get better at our communication with customers about issues that are painful (for them) but really hard to fix (for us). We’d fallen into a rut where when we would escalate these types of hard-to-fix issues to engineering, we would never really communicate anything meaningful to the customer, but at the same time we weren’t really prioritizing fixing the bug. From a customer experience lens, it wasn’t great.
So our OKR work aimed to get clarity from engineering about why these issues were hard to fix (maybe there was an underlying browser bug which was causing it) and then communicating that clearly to the customer. Rather than dragging the customer along for months with periodic check-ins saying “we haven’t forgotten about you!”, we’d just shoot it to them straight: “Here’s the problem. It’s hard. This is what it will take to fix it.”
The problem is, it bombed, at least at first. I joked that “Ben came back to support and managed to drag our customer satisfaction (CSAT) score down”. Either it was our wording (it needed to be tweaked) or our timing (these emails were really delayed), but what we thought would be a better CX wasn’t being well-received by customers, at least initially by the first two customers who had bothered to leave a review.
Enter Darkness
I had this thought slip into my mind: What if we just do nothing? What if we don’t provide clear communication to customers? What if we just keep the ticket open, never do anything with it, and if the customer cares enough, they can reply to ask for an update, at which point we’ll tell them “We haven’t forgotten about you!” It’ll probably be… fine? Fine in the sense that our CSAT won’t get dinged (because we never solve the ticket) and fine because maybe the customer won’t want to put in the effort to send yet another email to check in to see if the bug is going to be fixed. Doing nothing is an option, I guess.
I don’t know. I just can’t do that. I can’t accept it. My brain (or perhaps my soul) can’t square that circle. It can’t actually be better—for the customer or for the business—to string the customer along in obscurity with no possible end in sight for the problem they’re experiencing. I mean, sure, businesses do that all the time, but having seen the problem, I can’t bring myself to choose that path forward. It just isn’t right.
What scares me about this is how easy it is to fall into these kinds of dark patterns. It can really feel like you’re on the edge, and at any point you could slip into darkness or through sheer willpower, bring yourself back into the light. What if CSAT was being held over my (or my manager’s) head as a reflection of support’s performance? Would we dare experiment with improving CX in a way that had the chance of negatively impacting CSAT, even in the short term? What if we reflected on the fact that successful public companies sometimes have notoriously poor CX, so why even bother? What if we just get busy, and tired, and generally feeling off, such that we aren’t able to put the time and energy into making something better than it is today?
To be sure, we’re still moving forward with our OKR work. We’ve tweaked our process and subsequent responses from customers have revealed they appreciate the transparency. The CX team and engineers are equally happy with the work we’re doing adding clarity to our communication (which, it’s a ton of work!). In the end, we’ll have improved both our employee and customer experience, but there was that moment, however brief, where we could have allowed the dark pattern to win out.
For me, I don’t want to live in a world where dark patterns are normal and accepted. I want to do what I can to support a working environment where clarity is valued. Dark patterns can emerge anywhere, but they don’t have to, and I certainly don’t think they’re enjoyable for me, my colleagues, or the customer. Granted, it usually takes a good deal of effort, but I’d much rather bring things into the light where we can work together to find a shared sense of understanding. That’s the world I want to live in and I believe others want to live in that world, too.
Etc.
Things I’ve read:
Matt Levine’s MoneyStuff column is back after a two week hiatus. You’ve got to read this story about Hertz (they’re bankrupt) trying to raise money by listing stock (which is literally worth zero dollars) from retail investors (that is, Robinhood)
An interesting take that compares the Apple app store to landlords seeking rent. “Based on the most concrete and most visible evidence, it is easy to construe Apple’s behavior as rent-seeking….Even traditional publications are incentivized to adopt a more simplistic tone and amplify the voice of online mobs.” If you want my take on the Hey situation, it’s that.
“If you raise [the price of] the effing hot dog, I will kill you,” Sinegal said. “Figure it out.” Costco.
“Nearly a century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, the search for the dead continues.”
The ‘Lost Cause’ That Built Jim Crow, if you don’t have time to read this whole article, just scroll down to the picture of the first South Carolina legislature after the civil war to realize just how hard white supremacists (for that’s what they indeed were) would work over the subsequent century to remove Black representation.