Interview with Me Clément Camion, from the firm En Clair | “Misleading interfaces are not inevitable”

Stopwatch to jostle the buyer, unnecessarily complex menus to confuse you, subscriptions obtained without real consent: the web is full of what we call “misleading interfaces”, dark patterns in English. Experts like M^e Clément Camion, from the En Clair firm, flushes them out. Interview.

Can you introduce your firm, En Clair? You specialize, intriguingly, “in plain language”?

Our mission is to simplify legal and contractual documents from the ground up. Our clients are companies, large organizations, we have public organizations or private companies. Do you know Éducaloi, a legal popularization organization? Geneviève Fortin, who is one of the three founding partners of En Clair, co-founded Éducaloi in the early 2000s. We come from the world of “plain language” in law.

How to summarize this concept of “deceptive” or “rigged” interfaces?

It is a phenomenon of information asymmetry between a company, an organization which articulates a discourse or a path, and a user who is often in a hurry, who has cognitive biases. Misleading interfaces, or dark patterns, defined in 2010 by Harry Brignull, are ways of exploiting this information asymmetry between the organization and the user or users. A dark pattern, it is first and foremost a design choice, it is a design decision. This is not necessarily fraud or dishonesty.

Give us an inventory. We come across a lot of these on the web, these deceptive interfaces?

My personal experience is that every time I browse a website, I see them. With digital technology, we have the power to analyze behavior with quantified data. We manage to say: “this is addictive, people come back”. We are close to the slot machine in certain contexts. The example that I find the most telling is Amazon Prime. It’s easy to subscribe, perhaps inadvertently in some cases, because the button that appears to be the next button is actually a subscribe button. And then to unsubscribe, it’s an obstacle course.

What do you think of the windows that now greet us in almost every site to obtain our consent?

The “control banners” are often there to bias our choice. It’s annoying, it’s tiring, it’s an obstacle in our path to reaching information. Very often, we accept, we consent because otherwise, we do not have access to the site. It’s the dark pattern the most common and, unfortunately, it is the new regulations that have created this.

But can’t the Internet user simply say no?

There is a study by the National Commission for Informatics and Liberties, in France – they are very alert on design issues. In 2023, they commissioned a study on control banners. They kept the same content, the same consent, but played with the buttons, their color, and asked the subjects if they wanted to be followed. Between 50 and 75% do not want to be tracked, but, depending on the interface we offer them, we can obtain consent rates of up to 80%.

How much choice do we have to accept or refuse?

This is not inevitable. There are sites that ask for my consent while being very balanced. The devil is in the details. Another example: free trials that turn into paid subscriptions. The user will forget and then end up paying, perhaps in spite of themselves. We are human, we have plenty of cognitive biases that cause our memory to fail us.

Are these “cognitive biases” well known to site designers?

There are 180 cognitive biases listed. For example, misleading users with progress bars that are fake. We exploit the completion bias: people like to complete tasks, so they are told that they are at 80% and therefore close to completion, but they are not really. Or we can look for slightly more sensitive information, but later, just before we conclude.

We can also exploit the person’s sense of urgency with false scarcity, or a timer that tells us there are three minutes left to complete the transaction. There are contexts where it is justified, but sometimes it is just to exploit the sense of urgency.

Here we come to a major difficulty: how do we know if it is justified?

It’s not always clear. Is this really meant to achieve an end or is it bad design? This sometimes creates false beliefs, such as the idea that a particular complaint system is so complicated that it is designed to discourage me.

Are there any remedies for ordinary people?

We are faced with the complexity of the management system. There is the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the Financial Markets Authority, the Access to Information Commission, the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-Television Services (CCTS)… The mission of all these organizations is still segmented, the issues of low intensity, of very low value, it is not worth the candle on an individual basis. At this point, there are firms that specialize in this: collective action may be an option.

What are the solutions ?

There are perhaps technical and technological solutions that will emerge. And the fact of naming the phenomenon of misleading interfaces, of saying that it is not inevitable, that it could be otherwise… As consumers, that gives us power. And businesses can do better. This is what we do at En Clair. We support them, we do research, we tell them how to achieve their business objectives without engaging in practices that are ethically questionable. Because in the long term, it’s not strategic, it’s not winning. What is at stake is the loss of trust, first in one trader, then in an entire industry.

For brevity and clarity, this interview has been edited.