Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation

by Chris Nodder

Learn how companies make us feel good about doing what they want. Approaching persuasive design from the dark side, this book melds psychology, marketing, and design concepts to show why we're susceptible to certain persuasive techniques. Packed with examples from every nook and cranny of the web, it provides easily digestible and applicable patterns for putting these design techniques to work. Organized by the seven deadly sins, itNow you too can leverage human fallibility to create powerful persuasive interfaces that people will love to use -- but will you use your new knowledge for good or evil? Learn more on the companion website, evilbydesign.info.

Genres: Design, Psychology, Business, Nonfiction, Technology, Website Design, Reference

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Ahmad hosseini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sloth, pride, envy, greed, lust, anger, gluttony. The list of seven deadly sins provides a nice, tidy statement of fundamental human behavior. Each chapter in this book addresses one of these sins, pointing out the human characteristics that enable software designer to create persuasive interfaces that appeal to each weakness.
The 57 patterns described in this book are strong mechanisms for persuasion. They can be used in digital and physical products to increase customer loyalty or to attract new customers. In addition, you can use this information to recognize and avoid being personally persuaded by these principles when they appear in sites you use.
But why should design be based on evil? Simple: starting with evil means starting with real human behavior. This doesn’t mean that the result is evil. It means that understanding what each sin represents ads to an understanding of people and good design results from good understanding.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book on evil design.

Is evil design to the benefit of the corporation done on purpose, or by accident? Some of the examples of this book really uncovered the underlying motives and seedy practices of design.

I learned a lot, and it was really fascinating how much influence you can have on someone by these little 'nudges'. Great information to know as a digital marketer.

Oh, and Chris is amazing on LiL.

4.3/5

[Wendelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an edifying book that shows how online advertising or site design can make use of psychological techniques to prey on our fallibility to pride, greed, sloth, lust, gluttony, anger and wrath and to keep us buying and patronizing a product.

[Quratulain · Rating 5 out of 5]

“
The seven sins are all around us, easy to spot. The designs that apply the underlying behavioral forces that underpin the sins are harder to discern.
In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. Mark Twain
Design is about persuasion
Websites capitalize on our weaknesses- to profit at our expense. The best sites manage to make us feel good at the same time.
Stupidity isn’t evil.
It takes a truly well-conceived evil design to make us come back for more. People will willingly enter into the deal, even when the terms are exposed to them.
Evil design works by convincing customers that the value proposition is in their best interest financially or emotionally and by persuading customers to participate even if they are aware of the imbalance of the outcome.
Pride
Dissonance is resolved by rationalizing your opinions even if that leaves you believing something strange.”
Provide reasons for people to use: if you expect users will be conflicted about the product or the service you offer, provide them with many reasons they can use to resolve cognitive dissonance and keep their pride intact. $300 axe or $30 axe
People are biased to see their choices as correct. Any supporting evidence can reinforce the initial opinions that led them to choose your product, help them rationalize their deduction and thus leave them happier with their initial choice.
Help them visualize a rosy future with your product.
Add something cheap but unique to your product offering.
Hire good product packaging and site designers.
SOCIAL PROOF: Much of our behavior is determined by our impressions of what is the correct thing to do; what others do.
Dispel Doubt: repeat positive messages from different sources can provide social proof that helps users form a decision.”
People rely on social proof more when they are unsure what to do: new users, shopping for infrequent or unfamiliar purchase or people seeking expertise.
Users tend not to notice that the same basic message is repeated to them in different ways each time.
Social proof examples should guide people in the direction that you want.
Personal messages hit home. Messages aimed directly at the user grab attention. Messages that come from friends and trusted others have even more effect.
Social proof works best if the social group used as the proof closely matches the current user.
Gain public commitment to a decision: make a users decision public and they will feel more inclined to carry through with the action and defend the decision.”
Change opinions by emphasizing general similarities: people don’t like to change opinions and ignore counter factual information. Should them how similar your desired position is to their current opinion.”
Don’t try to persuade people that they should change. Show them how they are already doing elements of what you want them to do.
Talk in general terms that can be interpreted positively by any user.
Talk about aspirations. People feel motivated to achieve their aspirations even if they never actually work toward them.”
Use images of certification and endorsement: or create your own certification, promise, or guarantee.
Website credibility: presumed credibility, surface credibility, reputed credibility, and earned credibility.
Sites displaying trust certifications are actually significantly less trustworthy than those that forego certification.”
Help people complete a set: the compulsion to collect, to be complete, drives people to action. Give people some initial items for free, then set them to work completing the set.”
SLOTH
The lack of purpose is the game’s purpose. Cow clicker. They are fundamentally designed to get users to click on things, and to worry about those things sufficiently that they come back and click some more- time and again.
Pander to peoples desire for order. Make them tidy up by giving you the information you want or completing the tasks you require.”
Show users the disorder associated with their account. Give them easy ways to resolve it. Create sense of progression by logica steps towards order. Show missing data gaps. Make the gaps public to create shame. Reward tidiness.”
Any new concept that you introduce that differs from their existing knowledge will create cognitive dissonance.”
Desire Lines: follow users perceived path of least resistance between the current location and their desired goal.
Path of least resistance: ensure your desires end result is in the easiest path through the process. Hide disclaimers in locations away from this path.@
Most users in Western societies scan content-rich web pages in an F-pattern.
People confuse the large number of options with importance. This then leads to spending more time trying to make a decision than the decision actually merits.”
Provide fewer options: the more choices we have, the higher our expectations. The higher our expectations the more likely we are to be disappointed when the outcome isn’t exactly what we want.”
The longer they spend in this illusion of choosing, the more importance they will attribute to the resulting decision.
A combination of filters, recommendations, and guarantees can convince people they’ve done allthe necessary research.
Prime people so they are open to accepting the choice you highlight.”
Make options hard to find or understand.
Sign up people by default and make it harder for them to Unsign than to continue down your preferred path. Use desire lines to hide the sign-up in plain site.”
Negative Options: Advance Consent Marketing.
1) prenotification negative options 2) continuity negative options 3) auto renewal negative options 4) free-to-pay or nominal fee-to-pay negative options.
By sliding the agreement into an otherwise familiar process, and by using the same style of wording that the process normally uses, it is possible to get users to agree to things that they would never normally countenance.”
These tactics are designed to wear consumers down. The harder it is to cancel the membership, the more peoples slothful behavior will kick in.”
Our sloth also leads us to accept default options either because we can’t be bothered to change them or when we have run out of decision making energy.”
Gluttony
Scarcity, exclusivity, and loss aversion play on the fears behind gluttony
Make customers work for a reward.
Consider a small reward rather than a big one: customers will be forced to create justifications which increase the perceived value of the reward.”
Provide just a small reward to make people create their own reasons for participating. They will come to believe and defend those reasons as a way to resolve cognitive dissonance.
Auction sites: Irrational Escalation of Commitment and the Sunk Cost Fallacy
Make the arithmetic with your product hard to perform. Add confounding factors such as urgency, excitement, competition so that users focus on the is rather than the math. Automate the process of spending money. Provide tutorials of easy process without exposing the implications. Use tokens to remove sense of spending real money
Show the problems: manage the message around the weakness. Ability, Integrity, Benevolence
“For this reason many consider that a wise prince, when he has the opportunity, ought with craft to foster some animosity against himself so that, having crushed it, his renown may rise higher.” Machiavelli
Many patients who file malpractice lawsuits do so mainly to understand what happened and why and through a need to prevent the same incident from happening to others in the future.” Integrity.
Foot-in-the-door: gain commitment to a small thing to convince about a big thing.”
Escalate commitment gradually so that each individual step seems reasonable and by the end, you’ll have a level of commitment that would have seemed totally unreasonable at the beginning.
After there’s initial agreement, it’s easier to change the boundaries of the agreement because it would be cognitively dissonant for customers to go against what they first agreed to.”
Door-in-the face: ask for a big thing. When they turn you down, immediately ask for something smaller. Guilt makes people more likely to agree to the small thing.”
Guilt most affects in-group members.
Present hard decisions only after investment.
Gather the minimum amount of information necessary to furnish the service. Always tie the requests to a reciprocal agreement.
Tom Sawyer Effect: three elements of scarcity: infrequency, exclusivity, competition.
I still doubt to prevent cancellations: tap into loss aversion.
Loss aversion is strongest when people have recently experienced the benefits of the product or service.
Impatience leads to compliance: put a time constraint on a task and offer to help users through it.
Gluttony is a failure of self-control.”
Anger is fear with a focus: an understanding of what caused the fear and also the capacity to resolve the fear by acting to remove it.”
Anger: love of Justice perverted to revenge and spite. Dante
Use humor to reduce the potential for anger but not to deal with existing anger.
Humor should be whimsical and not hostile or aggressive.
Jokes are only funny once; don’t show humorous content too many times.
Consider Placatory approach instead of humor.
Avoid overt anger with a slippery slope: avoid backlash by making several, small sequential changes rather than one big one. Individual changes should be sufficiently inoffensive.
Loss aversion leads people to overestimate the potential losses from a change and under-estimate potential gains. They overvalue their current situation (endowment effect). People stick with current option if they have less information about their potential choices.
Use metaphysical arguments to beat opponents: when appeals to rational thought fail, side-step logic and use metaphysical constructs in your arguments. Claim to have something that science cannot explain.
1) crest a phantom 2)set a rationalization trap 3) manufacture source credibility and sincerity 4) establish a granfallon 5) use self-generated persuasion 6) construct vivid appeals 7) use pre-persuasion 8) frequently use heuristics and commonplaces 9) attack opponents through innuendo and character assassination
Use anonymity to encourage repressed behaviors: people will do more when they’re anonymous than when they’re identifiable.
John Suler Online Disinhibition Effect: being anonymous provides sense of protection; online embodiment is different than persons true self; online conversations are asynchronous; easy to assign negative traits to people you don’t interact with face to face; people see online environment as game where normal rules don’t apply; it’s not clear who is or is not an authority figure.”
Give people permission: if an authority figure tells people to do something it removes individual responsibility.”
Give people permission: moral justification; euphemistic labeling; advantageous comparison; displacement of responsibility; distortion of consequences.
Give people a small role to play so they don’t feel entirely responsible. Use an authority figure to make individuals take responsibility.
Scare people and then show them how to remove the fear using your product.
Unhappiness triggers commerce. We buy because we are dissatisfied.
Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.
Anger has a defined target and potential for resolution. Fear does not.
Presenting a problem with an unknown cause creates fear; a problem wit a more global cause that is not under the individuals control invokes sadness; a problem for which the individual is responsible gives feelings of guilt or shame.”
Destructive Envy- feeling of deprivation, inferiority, or shame.
Precursors of envy are aspiration and desire.
Create desirability to produce envy: secrecy, scarcity, identity, aesthetics, functionality
Create something aspirational: give your users something to aspire to. Benign envy is a powerful motivator.”
Clever advertising embraces both aspiration and scorn.
Rich people are viewed as competent yet cold. Poor people as incompetent yet warm.”
Make people feel ownership before they’ve bought. They will value the item more, increasing their desire to purchase.”
Create status differences to drive behavior: without differentiation, there can be no envy.
Create opportunities for users to pity or scorn other groups.”
Emphasize achievement as a form of status: when they achieve company-serving goals. This trains them to keep coming back.
Emphasize achievement: focus users attention on how many points they’ve gained , not how many they need for a reward; prime the account; remind users of benefits that accrue with rewards; set and control the exchange rate so it is sufficiently valuable; offer different types of achievement.
Encourage payment as an alternative to achievement.
Let users advertise their status. Encourage users to build and advertise their status within a community.”
Let people feel important: giving people a little bit of recognition makes them love you more and do more for you.”
If you compliment people on possessing a positive trait, you can then later ask them to apply that trait in your direction.”
Meeting anybody after spending too long vetting them beforehand is likely to lead to disappointment.”
Making an effort to be like able before someone has created high expectations is even more likely to work.
It is possible to insert ideas into peoples minds that lead them to liking or disliking an individual or idea.
It’s easy to create a self-reinforcing group based on even the most flimsy of criterIa.
It’s possible to be so perfect that we end up disliking people because they are a threat to our self-esteem.”
Flattery makes people more responsive to persuasion.”
We are so desperate for praise that we don’t filter it in the same way that we do with criticism. Even if we’re unaware that the praise is synthetic, we still accept it on a subconscious level.”
If consumers self-esteem is raised before the flattery occurs, then the conscious recognition that this was insincere flattery outweighed and overruled the subconscious longer-term positive effect.
Label people and then make a request of that label.
Monetize anxiety and insecurity.
Be the second best: game theory and self-esteem dictate that you’ll avoid the top of the pack.
The pratfall effect: blunder humanizes the superior person. Effect is stronger when the observer feels at least some level of social comparison with the blundered. When the individual being rated is out of the observers league, observers prefer the nonblundering superior person.”
Regardless of our idealized desires, we will end up choosing the most likeable rather than the objectively best person.
The more consensus there is about a woman’s looks, the less messages she receives. When men can’t agree on her appeal, she gets more messages overall.”
Frame your messages as a question. Push-Polling- lead with a question that puts doubt about your competitor into customers minds. The question doesn’t have to be based in fact.
If possible, avoid naming competitors directly: makes you look petty, isn’t useful, and give them extra brand impression.”
Create an in-group: show customers that they belong to your preferred group and they will take on and defend its traits.”
Between two ostensibly identical services, the one that best demonstrates its intangible value will be seen as more desirable.”
Give something to get something: people will feel obliged to reciprocate.”
If time elapses between your gifts and your requested response, recipients will have reduced the value of that gift in their mind.
Reciprocity doesn’t have to be symmetrical; it can be paid forward.
Make something free: rationality disappears. You can recoup the money elsewhere.”
People do not simply subtract costs from benefits. They see free products as having more benefits.”
The additional emotions response of free creates more value than a straight discount.
Sell the intangible value: perception is less costly to change.”
Change how you are perceived. Find ways to turn negatives into positives.
Make a request in order to be seen more favorably: Ben Franklin effect shows that people who have done us a favor see us in a better light.”
Having done an unreciprocated favor for you, they must justify it to themselves by believing that they truly like you.”
Be sure tha favor is successfully completed. Without that, there will be no increase in liking. You should make the favor easy to perform.”
GREED
Use a partial reinforcement schedule: keep people playing longer
Create multiple goals that can be worked on simultaneously:1)some fixed interval/ratio events 2) shorter-term Variable interval/ratio events 3) prevent people from ignoring you by giving negative reinforcement using a variable interval.
Make it into a game: turn onerous tasks into a game by providing minimal rewards for participation.”
Customers should win rather than finish or buy: tap into the fear of losing out by describing events as competitions rather than as lotteries.”
Sales reward bargain hunters. People like to feel they’ve won and that there was an element of skill, rather than feeling like they were lucky.”
Deal seekers are unlikely to become long-term customers.”
Further inflate peoples already overconfident feelings of skill and mastery. Ease unskilled individuals into a task with some quick wins. Illusive superiority will make them likely to continue.
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” Bertrand Russell. Dunning-Kruger Effect
Poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve.”
Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction. Warren Buffet
Make rewards seem due to skill, not luck: requiring action to get a reward increases the perceived value of the reward.”
Keep ignorant people ignorant. They will continue to overestimate their competence.
Reward people early with quick wins. Make it possible so that initial losses don’t feel too discouraging.”
Skinner showed that making rewards happen on a purely random luck-based schedule leads to weird, superstitious behaviors.”
Giving people choices and making them take action, gives them pseudo-control.
Create a walled garden to keep subscribers in. Maximize ad revenue.
Test your users advertising tolerance. Track users outside.
We look for coherence between the new price and the last price we paid.”
The view we form on what is cheap and what is expensive is somewhat arbitrary.”
Changing the set of items that people compare has a similar effect. By excluding items that provide a more considered baseline, companies can encourage consumers to justify their greedy impulses.”
Own the anchor: create the anchor point that describes the value of your offering so that you control the terms.”
Move from money to tokens: tokens can have arbitrary value.
Decouple token value from a specific dollar value. Sell tokens in large blocks. Keep process of replenishing tokens separate from the process of spending them so people are less likely to consider the real price. Ensure tokens can only be used within the jurisdiction. Use tokens as rewards within the system. Restrict redemption
Encourage breakage: customers spend more to redeem the token or gift card.
Breakage- dollar value of unredeemed prepaid items.”
To maximize breakage: companies make it hard to redeem the full value of the prepaid item without ever leaving behind money or contributing more money to complete the purchase.”
Make it expensive: increasing cost can increase peoples appreciation of a product.”
Consumers often believe that indulging can compensate for the pain of payment.
Halo effect: other cheaper products in your line-up will receive a psychological benefit from association with the expensive product.”
evelop systems that amplify

[Chris Branch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why would software designers and developers intentionally create software that is unethical? This book, provides, perhaps inadvertently, a telling explanation. Nodder presents and describes the variety of methods used by software producers to persuade software consumers to behave in ways that benefit the designer. He frames the discussion in terms of the Biblical “seven deadly sins” as a way of linking modern uses of technology to aspects of psychology that have existed throughout human history.

While the book is engagingly written and informative (if a bit dated in its web site references), Nodder avoids taking an ethical stand against the use of these techniques. He leaves it largely up to the reader as to how this information is to be used, and has no qualms against explicitly providing advice to designers that could objectively be considered unethical. For example, in the chapter on Pride, he suggests that designers “Persuade your users to give you access to post to their social media accounts. You probably don't have to be deceptive …” and in the chapter on Greed, he recommends: “Artificially inflate the cost of your secondary object or reduce its feature set/desirability to make the primary object appear as a comparatively good value for money, even though it is more expensive.”

In a summarizing chapter at the end of the book, readers are given justifications for using persuasive techniques. The author points out that “There is a continuum from persuasion to deception.” and provides several anecdotes, including the use of an “anti-monster” spray for scared children and the use of a fake bus stop near a facility for Alzheimer’s patients to give them a sense of agency. First, it should be noted that these chosen cases involve precisely examples of vulnerable populations (children and those with mental illness) whose members should not be subjected to potentially unethical tactics. Second, these are undeniably exceptional cases, so even if these situations do justify the ethical use of deception, this does not make it valid for a software producer to conclude by extension that the use of persuasion or deception is ethical in the particular case they are concerned with.

Nodder even pushes back against the “Golden Rule” of persuasion proposed by Berdichevsky and Neuenschwander in their 1999 paper. As an argument against the idea that “The creators of a persuasive technology should never seek to persuade anyone of something they themselves would not consent to be persuaded of”, Nodder asks, for example: “Is it okay for a smoker to make an iPhone app to help others quit smoking?” and concludes that even deception and coercion “can be very practically applied toward positive ends.” Further, he reminds the reader that “it’s okay to make money,” suggesting that software producers will need to discover for themselves the “boundary that distinguishes good business practice from evil design.”

It's certainly true that software developers are not being intentionally evil - rather, they are driven by the same long-standing incentives, financial and otherwise, that affect all of us. But given the amount of persuasion taking place today via technology that many of us have become dependent on, it's worth asking if we want to live in a world in which developers are encouraged to use such tactics.

[Kit Sunde · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's an okay book on creating incentives and getting users to perform the actions you want. As the name suggests quite a lot of it gives examples of morally questionable tricks that would be difficult to blanked apply to any website, especially if you're seeking to retain users and trust. Which is not a criticism of the book, if anything it makes it perfectly clear what the expected consequences and result would be.

The author does give references, if sometimes anecdotally and sometimes on studies done in industries in the real world. I'm unconvinced that grouping the lessons by the 7-sins is useful or will help me recall any of the lessons in the future.

All in all, the book was more informative than I thought it would be.

[Milagros Guevara Bernabé · Rating 3 out of 5]

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation de Chris Nodder es un libro que revela cómo los principios de la psicología y el marketing se entrelazan con el diseño para persuadir, seducir o incluso manipular a los usuarios.

📌 Aprendizajes clave:

1. El diseño nunca es neutral → siempre guía al usuario hacia una acción.

2. Los 7 pecados capitales son atajos emocionales que los diseñadores usan: orgullo, pereza, gula, ira, envidia, lujuria y codicia.

3. Persuasión ≠ manipulación → la diferencia está en la intención:

• ¿Beneficia también al usuario? → ✅ persuasión positiva.

• ¿Solo beneficia a la empresa? → ❌ manipulación.

4. Pequeños detalles importan → colores, defaults, recompensas, exclusividad… todo puede cambiar la decisión del usuario.

5. El diseño es un juego → si el usuario siente que gana (aprende, progresa, disfruta), el diseño es justo.

✨ En conclusión:

Este libro es una guía imprescindible para entender cómo las apps, webs y productos logran engancharnos. Explica con ejemplos claros cómo se aplican los siete pecados capitales al diseño, y nos deja una pregunta ética: ¿quieres usar estas técnicas para motivar o para manipular?

[Elvi Nissen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a bookclub meeting. The evening's discussion mostly revolved around the feeling that it was a somewhat forced book.
The idea of ​​manipulating / directing the user by appealing to our inclination towards the seven deathly sins is fun. But the execution fell somewhat short. Many of the examples in the seven first chapters (one for each sin) seemed a little sought, and the author seemed to struggle a bit a distinguishing, for example, Greed and Lust. Lust became more ‘curiosity’.

The book was also clearly directed at an American audience. For example, "free" is not a plus in Denmark - we have a natural skepticism when stuff is free. "Cheap" on the other hand: We’ll take the plunge anytime! Some reflections on cultural differences would have suited the book. The sins may be universal, but they manifest themselves differently depending on the ‘congregation’.

We also missed examples of where our sinning could be used positively. It would probably go against the title of the book, however. But positive friction is somewhat more useful in our minds.

That being said, the last chapters of ethics when using this the of manipulation and the overview of the 57 ‘tricks’ were actually good. They gave food for thought - and were not as annoying as the rest of the book.

[Carly Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am honestly not 100% sure how I feel about this book. There are aspects I liked and disliked. I think the framing in the 7 deadly sins was interesting, but I feel that with the almost sole focus being on "evil" design and a supposedly sarcastic "how-to" design for evil design I feel like was not a good idea. You can talk about this with "evil" examples and end with why and how to avoid this, and I cannot recall anything like that being mentioned; maybe the preface?

The examples were very interesting, but I feel like those who are either newer to UX/interaction design or are project managers/similar positions could easily use this with all the "how-to's" to create design for business, not users.

[Luis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has opened my eyes to so many sneaky methods that are used on me to sell or make me engage with a site.

In fairness, these methods don't have to be evil. However knowing of their presence and understanding why they're there makes you think twice about your online behavior and many other things.

I need some time to really understand each pattern mentioned. At times it felt like it was so obvious yet I hadn't noticed. Other times I had to think for a while and accept that I got fooled.

Needles to say, I'm fascinated by this world of design principles and behavioral understanding. I can't recommend this book enough.

[Julia Kulgavchuk · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book uses religious categories to structure dark patterns in design. Natural inclinations and curiosities of humans are archaically labelled as deadly sins and that terminology is used throughout the book. I see it as a categorical mistake. Is the use of ‘sin’ ironic? If it is, Nodder fails to communicate the irony.

[Joona · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy to read book that points out many tactics used by websites to steer and manipulate their users. Most of the insights aren't anything complex, pretty common sense stuff but interesting nevertheless thanks to many real-world examples provided.

[Marcus Cramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have read books on bias, heuristics and behavioral economics, you will be familiar with most of the ideas. It is still a great collection and a great read for people involved in product/ux design.

[Luis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit dated now, Evil By Design was a great look into how websites and other online services capture people's attention or their trust. I'm not sure a more recent book exists out there but many of the concepts described within are still put to use today. The tactics are just more refined now.

[Joanne Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An odd writing style as the author reluctantly shares every trick in the book used by designers to overwhelm our willpower and dial up impulsivity. I read it in two sittings so it's a thumbs up for me!

[Denise Tiggelman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book with lots of info about psychology and how businesses use it against us. I would say its definitely evil to use most of these things but good to know about. Some however could be used to do good.

[Tom Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting, enabled me to improve some of my UX concepts based on the psychology in this book. Easy to dip in and out of and good for design inspiration.

[Arash Narchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book to help understand the psychology and persuasion behind interaction design

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book very informative and full of strategies I have certainly unwittingly succumbed to.

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too repetitive. Unless you're a complete Newbie, this is just basic knowledge.

[Angie Helgeson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outdated but I'll be able to put some things to practice for a good cause.
Wouldn't mind reading an updated version of this post Americas downfall.

[Albiere · Rating 4 out of 5]

achei interresante

[Miles Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation" is a provocative read that I've shared with my entire company. It serves as a rallying point for our design team, highlighting how to motivate customers through design while emphasizing the importance of ethical practices. Despite its outdated references, the book's core concepts on influencing customer behavior are clear and compelling. It has inspired us to conduct "Evil by Design" inspired workshops with our enterprise clients, sparking discussions on the power of design and our responsibility to use it for good. This book is a must-read for designers and business leaders alike, offering valuable insights into the ethical dimensions of design.

[Colin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

[Wilte · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically a behavioral economics book, applied to interaction design. Nice touch to categorize our biases in the seven sins. Great title too. So I didn't learn a lot of new things but it was nice to read the familiar BE/nudge-examples through a slightly different lens. Also nice that real applications are discussed instead of a rehash/summary of nice academic studies.

And this quote resonated with me (I work at a regulator): "Perhaps the regulators should insist that opting out take as few clicks from the homepage as the process of opting in, using links or buttons equally as prominent."

Quotes:
Sites capitalize on our weaknesses. Sometimes their intentions are good, but mainly they do this for “evil”—in other words to profit at our expense. The best sites manage to make us feel good at the same time.

Stupidity isn’t evil. People who create bad designs because they don’t know any better or because they are lazy aren’t being evil. Evil design must be intentional.

So evil design is that which creates purposefully designed interfaces that make users emotionally involved in doing something that benefits the designer more than them.

If you are caught doing bad things with user data, apologize profusely and then add more check boxes, explanations, and options to your privacy center, so it’s even harder to divine the correct settings.

These tactics are designed to wear consumers down. The harder it is to cancel the membership, the more people’s slothful behavior will kick in.

Perhaps the regulators should insist that opting out take as few clicks from the homepage as the process of opting in, using links or buttons equally as prominent.

The principles laid out in each of the seven deadly sin chapters can be applied either for good or for evil. How far you take it is up to you. There is a continuum from persuasion to deception. That continuum takes in everything from being totally open, through being economical with (or neglecting to mention) certain truths, through bent truths and white lies, to all-out deception.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another one of these like pop culture/ design/ psychology books I'm try to read.

It's alright, I'm glad I got this one at a library instead of buying it though. It reminds me a lot of Thinking Fast and Slow. The list of patterns and biases have much more focused use cases and it doesn't belabor the same points for too long. The main problem I had with this book was how it was sorted by deadly sin. I'd say those sins almost never correlate to the patterns listed within them. It was pretty shoe horned and I kept getting distracted trying to figure out how something like "Make the math hard to understand" was listed under Gluttony instead of Sloth.

The discussions in the beginning and end about persuasion vs deception were also interesting, again not worth buying the book for but had some interesting use cases.

The overall design of the book is also good, fancy paper, good layout, lots of pictures. I kind of wish he differentiated a bit more between the different 'levels' of evilness with the icons though. He has little evil mouse icons to show possible methods of implementing a pattern, whchi I would think would also mean that he can have normal and angel mouse icons to show how it can be used for good, like community accountability for weight watchers programs.

The case studies and descriptions of specific companies that use these practices was the most interesting piece. It'll probably make the book useless in 50 years, but it's really helpful right now.

[Martin Sandström · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good list of persuasive design techniques shoehorned in a gimmicky format

I probably would've enjoyed this book more had I read it six years ago when I started to learn about persuasive design. Obviously the book wasn't published then, but even if you're reading it now and are fresh on the topic there are better options out there. Nodder paraphrases the classic behavioural economical research findings and books but adds little new to the table. I didn't like the format of shoehorning the psychological facts into the seven deadly sins, however this is of course the angle of the book so it'd be hard to get away from. The idea is great as we all love models and logical clustering, but I said shoehorning because that's what I often felt when I read the book. I would often think 'What does [topic] have to do with [current chapter]?'

What the book does well is listing a comprehensive number of design tactics based on psychology and (often) irrational behaviour. It might be a great book as introduction to the field of persuasive design, and it's written in plain, straight forward English.

[Christina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read more than half, then scanned the summaries for the last four chapters, which was good enough because the book was repetitive. Although the author provided examples throughout, my attention wandered because it felt so abstract. The device of structuring chapters around the seven deadly sins felt forced at times and simply repeated behavioral and economic research sited in more interesting books like Predictably Irrational. Also, many of the tactics felt truly evil, sometimes to the point of being unethical--such as paying for reviews on social media or obfuscating language to trick users into signing up for services. My skin is crawling!

[Ignas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really nice book to read. Writing style is easy and most of the tips in the book I found very useful and practical. Companies are trying to trick you and use your sins to get money from you, so when you know those tricks you can see more clear what is going on. Moreover those tips could be used in your business and design process (in a good or bad way, it really depends on you). So in general - was a great read and would recommend to a friend.

[Simona · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, mostly for its psychological take and for pointing out our many flaws and how susceptible to manipulation we are because of them. I don't plan on using the techniques described there to an accomplish a hidden evil agenda, but I will definitely try to keep them in mind so as not to fall into the trap of those 7 deadly sins. Because I am totally not gonna be persuaded by those evil tricks. Well, who I am trying to fool? Oh, poor me.