Dark Patterns, Cognitive Load, and Your Computer

I have to start today by apologizing. In last week’s newsletter, I dropped some inside baseball jargon without adequately explaining it. So today, I’m going to talk about dark patterns, cognitive load, and why these things matter in the modern context of phones and computers.

Cognitive load is an idea that came out of educational research in the 80s and it’s applied to a great deal of modern game and user interface design. It’s the idea that solving different types problems takes varying amounts of mental effort, that everyone has an upper limit for their capacity to solve problems, and that each person has a varying capacity to understand, process, and tackle those problems. Put simply, you can think of cognitive load as your brain’s budget for figuring stuff out.

Different types of problems add different amounts of load to your cognitive budget. Problems you understand and know how to solve create less load, while figuring out novel problems that you’ve never experienced before creates more load. And of course, everyone’s different. Some people are better or worse at different types of problems than others, and people’s respective ability to handle varied cognitive loads varies accordingly.

Dealing with a challenging cognitive load can be extremely satisfying. This is one of the main reasons that just playing some games feels really good—the act of perfectly dropping a block in Tetris, nailing a tricky jump in Mario, or finding a clever guess for Wordle makes your brain feel good.

It isn’t a universal truth, but games that are successful deliver an ideal cognitive load for a large audience of players. Wordle is a classic example—it provides context clues that signal it’s a challenging kind of word game, but when you actually do the math, Wordle is a fairly easy game to win if you make good guesses. In order to lose, you have to either have made bad or extremely unlucky guesses. (Apologies if you’re bad at Wordle.)

So if riding a high cognitive load feels good, what happens if you get overloaded, cognitively speaking? This probably won’t surprise you, but it feels bad. When you’re experiencing cognitive overload, you feel flustered, frustrated, or even upset. At an extreme, you may feel information paralysis or anger. Even riding a high cognitive load for an extended period of time can be stressful, which causes most people to make worse decisions.

Dark Patterns and You

Which brings us to dark patterns. Dark patterns are deceitful design choices that cause negative experiences for users and positive experiences for the developers. Dark patterns are used to mislead users, often into doing things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.

When you use software that utilizes malicious dark patterns, that experience often leaves you feeling bad. In games, they often create addictive loops in players that result in players feeling worse the more they play, instead of feeling better when they play. In apps, they increase feelings of frustration and often leave you feeling like you’re wasting your time.

Modern computers, phones, games, and websites expose you to so many dark patterns that you probably don’t even realize that you’re seeing them—apps that overwhelm you with information or notifications, software that’s difficult to navigate successfully, weaponized FOMO in apps and games, monthly or annual fees that create a feeling of obligation and sunk cost, relying on psychological tricks to make users feel inadequate, and more. I could probably do dozens of posts about dark patterns in app notifications, autogenerated emails, website designs, and more. For now, just trust me that most modern computers are, at best, a mess.

It’s often difficult to differentiate between poorly designed software and software that uses dark patterns maliciously. I say it doesn’t matter. If your computers are creating more work for you instead of less work, the end result is the same.

And big companies, like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon, are neither adequately protecting and warning users about these malicious apps, they’ve structured their businesses around services that are designed to capture an ever-growing traunch of cash from users.

So if you’ve ever thought that you used to enjoy using computers and spending time on the Internet, but that feeling has faded in recent years, it’s not just you. Computers are getting actively worse. The rise of dark patterns means that using computers today actually feels worse than it did just a decade ago. Recognizing and adapting to those dark patterns adds to the cognitive load you feel every time you use your computer.

What’s Next?

Which brings us to what’s next. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably like me— you’ve sensed that something isn’t quite right with your day-to-day computing. As computers became a de riguer part of modern life, our tech-free decompression time evaporated. Prior to the smartphone, most people used a computer while they were in the office working and then spent time in the real world on evenings and weekends.

That’s gone now. We’re all extremely online, all the time these days. And even if you’re feeling the load, most people aren’t yet. But I’m ready to figure out what’s next. It was either that or move to a cabin in the woods and sign off the Internet for good.

If you’re interested in carving some of your time back from your phone, I highly recommend the method recommended in this video. My screen time is down so much since starting this that I assume there’s an alarm going off in Apple’s mothership.

Next up for me, is going to be talking to people who are making the software and hardware, highlighting both the little projects and products that make computing better as well as focusing on the big swings folks that folks are taking to try and tackle these difficult problems that we’ve created for ourselves.

As always, I hope you’ll come along with me. If this is your first time here, I’d encourage you to hit the Sign Up button and get a new letter in your inbox every week. If you’re already coming by every week, please talk about it with your friends and co-workers! I don’t have a marketing budget, so I need your help to spread the message.

Thanks, and I’ll see you next week!