The path to e-commerce is paved with good intentions.
Every project starts the same way – a clear brief, a shared goal, a room full of people pointing in the same direction. As a designer, the patterns feel familiar before the work has even begun.
What’s never mentioned is the human cost. There are no bullet points for feelings. No line item for the moment a customer realises the journey they’re on is pushing them away rather than making them feel secure.
That realisation never arrives in the brief. It arrives later, when the work is already underway – when accepting it is easier than suffering the discomfort of starting over.
That’s where the story usually begins. And that’s where it usually goes wrong.
Chapter 1: Death By A Thousand Clicks
The friction never arrives all at once. It accumulates. Till it stares you in the face like a malware popup.
You notice it first on the product page. Prices slashed by 20%, a free gift waiting in your basket. Except there’s a toggle switch, and it’s turned on: Subscription, buried just below the price. You switch it off. The discount disappears. So does the gift.
You move to checkout expecting a payment page. Instead you get Featured Bundles, then Bestsellers, then a reminder about an upcoming occasion these would be perfect for. Each page requires a Skip, and each Skip feels like a small defeat. You find yourself wondering – is this the future of e-commerce or just plain greed?
After checkout, you’re presented one last offer. Sign up to a monthly subscription and save 25%. You remember making your choice three pages ago, but clearly the website didn’t. So you skip it once again. One final time.
Only it isn’t over.
An email arrives. Thank you for your order. And there, in the middle of it, a large blue button: Confirm your subscription. Not consider. Not review. Confirm. As if the decision has already been made on your behalf.
That’s the moment the penny dropped. Months after the product had been designed, tested, optimised, built, and shipped – I wasn’t looking at a user journey anymore. I was inside a user ordeal. One I probably contributed to in some way.
In the early stages of my career I was naive enough to accept the language that disguised it. Industry standard. Conversion best practice. Every tactic measured in isolation, and every decision pushing the experience a little further from the person on the other side of the screen – without any one pattern feeling like the tipping point.
But here’s the thing nobody puts in the brief, and one we forget so easily. Before any of us were designers, researchers, or coders – before the skills, the training, the diplomas – we were customers. And that double perspective reveals what a purely professional one never can.
Nobody understands friction better than the person trapped inside it.
Chapter 2: The Voice In The Room
Dark patterns aren’t the ethical failure of individual designers. They’re a systemic failure of how creative work gets commissioned, approved, and shipped. At some point, compromise becomes the norm. And once something becomes normal, it becomes very hard to question.
So who gets to say this feels wrong – and when?
The answer changes depending on where you are in your career. Not because the ethics change, but because the power does.
Early on, you notice the friction but say nothing. Diffidence and self-preservation are rational responses to an unequal power dynamic. That’s not weakness – it’s reality. But it’s also the stage where you build your ethical foundation quietly. You observe. You file it away. You develop the language for what you’re seeing, even if you’re not yet in a position to put it to words.
Mid-career, you start giving the friction more weight. You raise it with your manager, hoping the concern travels upward through someone with more standing. You may not be the authority in the room. But you can be the conscience.
Later, you say it directly. In the room. Sometimes to the client’s face. The outcome still depends on who holds the final say – it always will. But the responsibility of saying it out loud has become yours, regardless of what happens next.
The stage shifts every time your role does – your moral compass doesn’t need to.
Twenty years in, I’m rarely silent. I’ve also learned the most important thing my early career couldn’t teach me – that briefs define goals, not consequences. And whether my words change the outcome or disappear into the gap between good intentions and shipped products, it is my responsibility as a designer to stand up for the person on the other side of the screen.
Because now, more than ever, our humanity is the most important voice amidst the cacophony of conversion.
Chapter 3: Conscience Isn’t A Master Prompt
The system we experience so often might seem unfair. But at least it’s a human one. It is a system where some of us observe, some question, and some – under the weight of power and pressure – choose to stay silent. Messy, compromised, and imperfect.
Just like us humans.
The experiences we ship are built by people making conscious choices – or conscious non-choices – in rooms where someone could theoretically have said stop. The junior designer who filed the discomfort away. The mid-level who raised it with their manager. The senior who said it to the client’s face and got overruled anyway. All of them present. All of them, in some way, accountable.
But what happens when the room disappears entirely?
We’ve seen this before in many industries. Over-reliance on autopilot causing aviation disasters, wrongful diagnosis in healthcare by machines misinterpreting data. Automation bias has been known to trade instinct for efficiency, and us humans have inevitably paid the price for it.
A machine can’t look in the eyes of a child and realise it’s time to pause treatment, not because it’s not written in the code, but because human pain has invisible markers.
But no industry has exemplified this in a more impactful, and more widespread way, than social media, when we had to hand over some decisions to algorithms purely as a response to human behaviour.
Anybody who has been banned from Instagram because their content was flagged as a false-positive, or blocked on X when their activity was deemed suspicious for simply trying to log in after 6 months understands it all too well. My X account is still suspended, only because I tried to log in from my laptop once instead of my phone.
Handing moderation over to automated systems wasn’t done out of complacency or negligence, but pure necessity. And understandably so. Never before has user-moderation been required at such a scale, constantly, and at the same time. Governments struggle to moderate citizens in the millions – imagine moderating 3 billion users every day.
But when it went wrong – and wrong it went – there was no room to point to. No brief. No single person who approved the specific decision that caused the specific harm. Just a system doing exactly what it was designed to do – at a scale no human could have managed, or answered for.
Now apply that logic to design as a blanket approach. To every industry, across every product.
Imagine the checkout journey from earlier – the subscription toggles, the confirmation email – not designed by a team making uncomfortable compromises in a room, but generated by an AI optimisation system running thousands of micro-decisions autonomously, continuously, at scale. No junior designer noticing the friction and filing it away. No senior practitioner saying this feels wrong in a client meeting. No conscience in the room, because there is no room.
At least the dark patterns we encounter everyday can be attributed to a human state. Someone drew them. Someone approved them. Someone is answerable for them.
When we relinquish processes to automation, the fingerprints disappear. And with them, so does the accountability.
Conscience isn’t a master prompt. You can’t engineer it into a model. And you can’t automate the moment someone decides that a conversion metric is not worth the cost of the person behind it.
That judgment has always been ours to make. The question is whether we’re willing to keep making it, even as the systems around us make it easier not to.
Wrap up: The Cost Of Looking Away
Here’s the truth that never features in a project retro. When a customer encounters a deceptive pattern, something discreetly shifts. A small withdrawal of trust that compounds over time. They might buy the product again. But something has changed in how they feel about the brand – and that feeling is almost impossible to recover once it’s gone.
That’s the cost that never appears in a conversion metric. The slow erosion of the thing that made someone choose you in the first place.
We may not always get to choose what we build, because brands hold the brief, the budgets and the final say. That system is imperfect and largely dictated by OKRs, KPIs and an assortment of other letters.
But we can choose what we’re willing to stand behind.
We can choose when to file the discomfort away and when to put it on the table. We can choose to be the conscience in the room, even when the room would rather not have one.
And in a world where the room is disappearing – where the decisions are increasingly made by systems with no conscience to speak of – that choice becomes more important, not less. Because we are humans serving other humans, and if the only frame of reference machines have is how humans do things, then we need to do better.
Not just for the customer. For all of us.