You decide to be a Budweiser bottle for Halloween. You think, “I should really get into the head of Budweiser. Really study up on the brand voice, observe it’s customers, dive deep into the underworld of Bud.”

So you “Like” Budweiser on Facebook.

Fast forward to mid-November. Your costume was a success.You were even able to keep perfect beads of condensation flowing down your neck all night and still get a few phone numbers from girls that “don’t really drink beer” but might make an exception for you. That was fun.

Continuing to get marketing messaging for a beer you don’t even drink in your Facebook stream, not so fun.

So you bop over to the page and look for the “Unlike” button.

It takes you 5 mins of looking around. You didn’t find it where it was when you “Liked” it. You look on your profile. You look in your settings. Nothing! You go back to the page and carefully walk your eyes down every piece of text on the page and finally there it is, right next to “Create a Page for My Business” What?!? Why?

You’ve just been victim of a Dark Pattern.

Site designers place the functionality or information they want you to find front and center, then move it once you have completed the desirable behavior so you are less likely to undo said desirable behavior or re-find  information that does not support  the business’s plans for you.

So slimy

Now I get that it would be unsavory to have a big “Unlike” button at the top of the page but may I suggest a couple palatable solutions.

1. Provide an “Unlike” button for each item in my Like list.  As you can see the one place where you can find a full list of your Likes has no management capabilities.

2.  Add the Unlike button or link to the group of other functions available on the page. This just makes sense.

I could be wrong maybe this was just an oversight, but I don’t think so.

What really bothers me is every time a site does something like this….

1. Users  lose confidence in themselves. Most people will blame themselves for the inability to complete a task on-line. When people feel less confident, they stop trying to learn and we need users to grow with us so we can continue to grow the web.

2. We lose the trust of users. If users consistently feel they are being tricked and don’t understand, they will become more selective about what they do and how quickly they will do it. This makes our jobs a lot harder.

3. The site metrics are skewed. Good data is only as good as the data its self. If I’ve got 2k people that “Like” me only because they can’t figure out how to not “Like” me, the metrics of the entire program are thrown off.

If you haven’t checked out the Dark Patterns wiki be sure you do. I’m sure none of you are doing these things but just in-case

I have recently lost a couple fights to display form fields rather than a call-to-actions in newsletter promos.

Next time I shall be armed with this.

This increased conversions (submitted forms) 72.27%.

Over This

Not bad.

Be sure to subscribe to Which Test Won ‘s email. Tons of great tests results posted here. We don’t always get the research budget this site can fill some knowledge gaps and answer some “I wonders” (yeah I just made that up. you can use it)

I like the idea of using video to illustrate how things work and express complicated ideas. Video is also a great way to introduce new, less understood products and services.  The problem I often see with the use of video is the lack of set up, context and definition of expectations.

If you would like a a user to watch your video a great way to do it is to:

1. Tell them what it’s about

2. Tell them what they will get out of watching it

3. Tell them how long it is

4. Design a still image that starts to tell the story

I was reminded of all this by visiting the Wistia site.  Although they don’t hit points #3 & #4. They totally nail points #1 & #2.

The product is also really interesting, I wrote about this topic and the importance of defining success measurements for video a while back here. Looks like this could be a great tool for that.

Zip Car

This is nice. Instead of just a video still, the designers of this site took the opportunity to tell us a little about the video and encourage us to press play. This is a good example of staying on our game, little things like this can go a long way towards accomplishing our strategic goals but opportunities like this can be easy to miss when we are working on larger layout, architecture and interaction parts of the site.

I like that the message sets your expectations for what you are about to see. I would speculate that the quality of the view is much greater if you are prepared or already feeling engaged when you start the video. I also like that the real estate taken up by video player adds some value even if you don’t want to watch the video. Just reading the message relays information and strengths brand perception.

Quality of the view is an important metric to measure. The definition will vary depending on the purpose of the video, but understanding what a quality or successful view is, is an important step in creating the interaction and even the content of the video.

Is it successful if they watch 50%? 20%? Turn up the volume? Send to a friend? Watch more than once? Only watch the first 10 seconds but then navigate to exactly the right place in the conversion funnel? Is it a less than quality view if, they finish it then leave the site? Send it to a friend but as a joke? Navigate to a page that takes them further from conversion?

Just something to think about.