I’ve looked at design pat­terns many times before: per­sua­sive pat­terns, anti-patterns and inter­ac­tion pat­terns. The miss­ing link: dark patterns.

Accord­ing to Harry Brignull–the designer who really started the dis­cus­sion on this topic–dark pat­terns can suc­cinctly be described as “user inter­faces designed to trick peo­ple” or “dirty tricks design­ers use to make peo­ple do stuff”.

Brignull first wrote about this type of design pat­tern back in July 2010, fol­lowed shortly by a dark pat­terns pre­sen­ta­tion for design­ers and researchers (29m 27s) and, more recently, a pre­sen­ta­tion aimed at brand own­ers and mar­keters (25m 29s).

All of this leads to the Dark Pat­terns wiki: a list­ing of the most pop­u­lar meth­ods com­pa­nies use to trick peo­ple through their user inter­faces, includ­ing:

via Kot­tke