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Jul 25 9 min read

Are Notifications A Dark Pattern?

Text & Illustration: Andrew Wilshere

Have you ever had a nightmare where you were literally drowning
in little red notification badges? I did once, and it got me thinking:
what actually are notifications? And are they just another dark pattern
a form of coercion and online trickery? In this article, I explore the
phenomenon of pseudo-notifications, and conclude with some
thoughts on what the future might hold for notifications as a design
pattern.

. . .
What are notifications?
Notifications are nothing new. A doorbell is a notification system to
let me know that someone is outside my house. The ring of a telephone
is a signal that someone is waiting to talk. And an SMS ringtone noti-
fies me that a message has arrived.

However, since the arrival of smartphones, notifications have been sub-

tly changing. First, and above all, the apps and websites we use every
day love to notify us of everything they can. Our phones no longer just
alert us to calls and texts; they now remind us about game activity, tell
us when people are tweeting, and nag us to take our 10,000 daily steps.
Unlike doorbells, the things that todays apps and websites deem wor-
thy of a notification often dont really require our immediate attention
at all.

Second, notifications increasingly reach us by whatever means, and in

whatever context, they can. Whether its an icon with an unread count,
text scrolling in from the top of a smartphone screen, a special ring-
tone, or a disembodied voice assistant, notifications are designed to
penetrate our senses and interrupt whatever were doing. Distraction
isnt an unfortunate side-eect of notificationsit is one of their core
functions. Notifications are intended to draw us away from our current
activity, and refocus our attention on wherever that notification is com-
ing from.

Notifications are a powerful tool for UX designers and developers, be-

cause they work by pushing peoples psychological buttons. Appealing
to a deep human instinct to be socially integrated and accepted, that
number in a little red circle subtly tells us both that theres a social
transaction awaiting our attention, and that by ignoring it, were miss-
ing out on something. By now weve probably all experienced that
seemingly irrepressible urge to tap an icon just because it has an un-
read counteven if we already know were not interested in looking at
whatevers there.

Notifications were once there to tell us something we needed to

know. But has the desperation of companies to get us to engage with
their product turned notifications into an annoyancea manipulative,
destructive dark pattern?

. . .
Notifications as a dark pattern
A dark pattern refers to any design feature intended to deceive,
manipulate, or trick the user into taking an action that they didnt
desire or intend. These first emerged in the earliest days of the web,
when disreputable websites created popup windows in your browser,
and in many cases would bait and switch the user by inviting them to
click for one purpose, but then redirect to something unrelated.

The website Dark Patterns has assembled a pretty comprehensive typol-

ogy of dark patterns, and they maintain a hall of shame that calls out
companies and products that deliberately trick their users.

These days, dark patterns are both more widespread and more sophisti-
cated. Many sites use fairly harmless dark patterns to gather email sub-
scribersthrough things like subscribe boxes that appear as overlays
on a webpage when you scroll down.

These do annoy users, precisely because their appearance has not been
requested. But many companies accept that this occasional low-level
annoyance is a price worth paying to build a customer base, and indeed
most customers understand and accept that. Although, just as with ad-
vertising, we tolerate it more readily if its executed with some creative
panache.

Even that familiar subscribe box can be delivered with dierent levels
of trickery. For example, it can pop up in such a way that it is obviously
optional and can be dismissed or cancelled. But some sites will deliber-
ately make the popup look like a mandatory step, when in reality, there
is usually a way to close the message and continue reading.

OS-level notification managers have become a feature of Android and

iOS builds, in order to forcibly suppress notifications from apps. Simi-
larly, apps usually have notification controls built in, but often even
these are manipulative. For example, in Facebook Messenger, it used
only to be possible to disable notifications temporarily; they would then
automatically be turned back on after a few hours. Moreover, app noti-
fications are almost always switched on by default, rather than being
o automatically.

. . .
Examples of dark pattern notifications
Many of the sites we use every day now exploit our psychological
weakness for notificationsour fear of missing out. They use pseu-
do-notifications to deliver marketing messages, or simply to draw us
back to using their product when there is actually nothing of substance
to notify us about.

LinkedIn
Go to the LinkedIn homepage, and youll see a navigation bar that
looks something like this:

Hurrah, I think, I have 7 notifications! (Although Reactivate Pre-

mium? I never had Premiumanother dark pattern, playing on my
fear of loss).

But when I click to see these notifications, they turn out to be nothing
of the sort. Instead, Im served with pseudo-notifications encouraging
me to 1) engage with changes in other peoples profiles, 2) sign up to
their Premium service by promising to show me whos been looking at
my profile, and 3) browse job ads.
 LinkedIns pseudo-notifications

As a LinkedIn user, when we dont have any new messages or contact

requests, there will nevertheless be subtle forms of advertising waiting
in our notification feed. By engaging with this, we spend more time on
their site, click through to more pages, and complete a wider range of
actions.

Facebook
Facebook was one of the original engineers of the kind of notification
feed were used to seeing today. The company has in the past couple of
years also turned to using pseudo-notifications to draw people into in-
teracting with their service more consistently, and in new ways. For ex-
ample, when I arrived in Paris recently, I got a notification inviting me
to see where my friends had been in the city. First o, Facebook, thats
kind of creepy. And second, its not something I want to be pinged
about in my notifications feed.
 Facebooks notifications panel: none of these are really notifications

Similarly, Facebook will create notifications in response to how you are

using their service. If you are short of real notifications (comments,
likes, etc.) at the moment you refresh, it will use that lull to propose
other forms of engagementfor example, by encouraging you to look
back at Facebook memories, by giving you information about how
many consecutive days youve shared content, or by telling you how
many views your Pages have got.

Twitter
 Twitter effectively shows you other peoples notifications when youre short of your own

Twitter uses a similar strategy, populating your notifications feed to en-

sure there is always something new for you to engage with.

When the service doesnt have any direct interactions to tell you about,
it will start telling you about other users interactions instead. In the
screenshot above, its telling me about what people Im following are
doing on the sitea kind of meta-notification.

Twitter pushes this kind of notification into your phones notification

bar as well, inviting renewed interaction with their app.

. . .

Engagement at any cost?

Ive picked LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter here as three big and prom-
inent examples of this trend in notification design, but of course the
practice is increasingly common across a whole range of sites and sec-
tors. (Troublingly, my wine clubs website notifies me that I have 117
bottles of wine to review.)

The questions to be leveled at companies that use notifications in this

way must be these: Are you acting in your users interests, or in your
own? And if youre acting in your own interests, are you fairly balanc-
ing these with the interests of the user? Many sites rely on clicks for ad
revenue, and have discovered in notifications a quietly coercive way to
generate both.

In fairness, companies are faced with the problem that these methods
are very eective. Even when we, as users, understand that we are be-
ing manipulated, we still carry on clicking and tapping. And in a com-
mercial environment, it can spell disaster to refuse on principle to
deploy an eective marketing technique, when all of your competitors
are doing it and reaping the rewards.

. . .

Peak notification?
However, whether this approach to notification design remains eective
will depend precisely on the evolution of our attitudes as users. We
have probably all experienced notification fatigue at some point. Speak-
ing personally, the intrusive notification practices of platforms like Twit-
ter make me want to use those services less (but I remain
problematically addicted to Facebook).

As users learn to identify and avoid pseudo-notifications, just as we

learned to identify and avoid ads, notifications are likely to become less
persuasive, and therefore less eective as a way of leveraging user ac-
tion. And perhaps more significantly, if peoples attitudes to notifica-
tions harden, their deployment as a dark pattern will begin
systematically detracting from peoples perception of a brand. Con-
versely, in that scenario, companies and services that adopt a simpler,
more honest, and more transparent notification regime may benefit
from having exactly that selling point.

. . .

Notifications and the Tech/Life Balance

If yesterdays problem was work/life balance, then this story is
about tech/life balance. The use of notifications as a dark pattern is
important because it raises questions about how we regulate and con-
trol our personal use of smart technology in a world not only where it
is pervasive, but also where those running key services have no qualms
about bombarding us with information.

Technology has the potential to enhance our social and personal lives
by keeping us connected. But notifications show that technology also
has the power to impair our lives by supplanting real connections with
ones that have been commercially brokered, mediated, and processed.

This touches on the question of what it means to be human in the de-

veloped world in the 21st century. We are learning together how to en-
joy the benefits of our newfound connectedness, without losing touch
with why we actually value those connections in the first place, and
what we want technology to help us accomplish in and through our so-
cial relationships.

. . .

The future of notifications

Tech companies are not ignorant of the question of tech/life bal-
ance. As it becomes more pressing in the years to come, we can expect
services like Facebook to get smarter with when, how, and how often
they deploy pseudo-notifications.

Im sure that before long, Facebook will automatically learn what kind
of notifications I tend to engage with, and which I tend to ignore or dis-
miss. This data will enable the service automatically to send me a per-
sonalized mix of notifications based on what it has learned about my
preferences. For example, if its algorithms note that I always dismiss or
ignore notifications about being in a new city, a future iteration of Face-
book might learn to simply stop showing me that information, or show
me something else instead.

But with this comes an ethical hazard. At the moment, the pseudo-
notification dark pattern is quite crude, which at least makes it easy to
identify. But as services refine how their messages are chosen and deliv-
ered, it may become less and less obvious when information is being
tailored on the basis of machine learning about our individual online
behavior and latent preferences.
This begins to open the door to manipulation not only by fellow hu-
mans, but also by faceless algorithms that eventually learn to present
each of us only with information that we already want to seeperhaps
even only the news stories that are consistent with our present
worldview.

As users, we should be vigilant to ensure that we retain the capacity to

challenge and be challenged. As designers and developers, we must
seek to develop experiences that respect users as people with agency,
boundaries, and human dignity, and dont just treat them as a vessel for
clicks.

. . .

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