Have you ever signed up for a service you didn’t need or struggled to find the cancel button on a website? These tactics are far more than mere nuisances; they form a controversial web design strategy called “deceptive design tactics.” These strategies force users into making decisions they would not have otherwise been inclined to—for the gain of a business at the expense of consumer choice.

However, the real question is whether designers are being strategic and competitive with their marketing strategies or going against essential business principles, i.e., integrity and responsibility. With the growing data protection vigilance in India, the focus on such strategies is slowly shifting to the limelight. It is thus time to examine these deceptive design tactics, how they work, and the Indian legal framework. With this perspective in mind, let’s settle the debate:

Is this manipulative design strategy just a clever business move, or is it an unethical violation of consumer rights?

What exactly are deceptive design tactics?

Essentially, the term describes deliberate and ambiguous designs that lull the users into performing actions they do not want to carry out. For instance, buying a subscription you never wanted or sharing your information with a platform. However, these are not mere features. They are intentionally designed to be helpful to the business while leaving the user bewildered, annoyed, or oblivious of what they signed up for.

There is more preference for deceptive design tactics than ever. The reason for that is simple; they do their job. They rely on understanding and decision-making heuristics such as choice paradox, confirmation bias, and persuasive techniques to nudge users. However, this provokes questions regarding the acceptability and morality of such practices and their legitimacy. We have discussed various types of deceptive design tactics in detail here.

The Marketing Argument: Just clever business?

Businesses often video deceptive design strategies as effective tools to boost engagement and profits. In the heightened climate of online commercialisation, companies seek to grab their consumers’s attention more and more fervently. To enable this, focusing on metrics like user engagement, conversion rates, and churn is essential in a company’s General Availability (GA) metric.

Defenders of such tactics put them as being just the proper design techniques that enable users to continue focusing on a particular product or service. They claim that businesses are only improving the user interface, making users act in a way they might have worked about some feature they received had they not been prompted to act in such a manner.

For instance, when a website has a large and bright “accept cookies” button, the “manage settings” link is usually available in a small corner. This is an attempt at making it easy. The thinking behind deploying deceptive design strategies is to minimise the barriers to user engagement and make it painless for people to click, spend their money, and retain customers.

Some say that users still have that choice and control over their privacy preferences. However, it is just that the choice is now more straightforward for most. But is this the future and ease of use, or is it the technique to push users in a direction they do not wish to go? As an aware and informed user, you would want to know when the objective of “streamlined design” starts to move people around.

What does web design become deception?

From an ethical standpoint, it is not a mere act of creativity when companies use sneaky tricks in designing their products. Combined with disregarded cognitive biases, these designs interfere purposefully with users’ freedom of choice. This is the area where many techniques are considered legally ambiguous. Ethical design means giving the user an understandable and unambiguous choice so that the user can act in the best way for him. On the other hand, dark patterns are, by design, meant to deceive as they hide information from you and guide you into doing things that are mainly beneficial to the company.

This manipulation violates information control, whether the user should be aware of what the interface is willing to offer and have complete discretion in choosing what to do. In India, mainly due to the increased consideration to privacy in the recent past, there has been a lot of stress on the “informed “consent”.

The Legal Landscape in India

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 has a significant role to play ere. It does not exclusively mention deceptive design. However, practices that mislead consumers can be considered unfair, as per Section 2(47). Suppose a company is purposefully leading consumers astray by camouflaging cancel buttons or by never displaying the word “cancel” but “confirm” instead to those who have indicated they do not want something. In that case, it is violating consumer rights under the 2019 Act.

The most promising regulatory expectations are linked to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Once this Act is enacted, businesses will likely redesign their consent and data-gathering approaches.

Conclusion: Manipulation or Marketing?

Where are we in this discourse? Despite businesses using these tricks to increase activity levels, the typical downside is that they prey on the psychology of people to manipulate them into making confident choices they would not otherwise make. Such manipulation is ethically questionable, especially when considering them against the ongoing changes to India’s legal system where such design tricks may become the next focus of regulatory reform.

The bottom line is that deceptive design tactics may seem to win an immediate goal, but they lead to consumers’ distrust. While Indian laws are gradually beginning to harmonise with global laws, companies must emphasise designs for awareness without the obtrusiveness and sophistication of placing distractions in front of customers.