AssholeDesign

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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.

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Amazon Checkout. This should be illegal. (lemmy.one)

submitted 1 year ago by MoonlitSanguine@lemmy.one to c/assholedesign@lemmy.world

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That is not 2 separate buttons on the right, like I initially thought clicking through checkout.

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[–] 312@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why would it be two buttons on the right, and what behavior would you expect if “Cancel Anytime” was a button?

The goal of this is to get you to sign up for Prime, so there’s nothing yet to cancel.

This is “annoying” design in the sense that getting an upsell is annoying, but I don’t really see it as malicious/asshole.

[–] Sami@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's absolutely, 100% intentionally misleading. They even recognize that internally and are currently being sued for just that.

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the agency accused Amazon of using deceptive designs, known as “dark patterns,” to deceive consumers into enrolling in Prime, which provides subscribers with perks such as faster shipping for an fee of $139 annually, or $14.99 a month.

The FTC said Amazon made it difficult for customers to purchase an item without also subscribing to Prime. In some cases, consumers were presented with a button to complete their transactions — which didn’t clearly state it would also enroll them in Prime.

Getting out of a subscription was often too complicated, and Amazon leadership slowed or rejected changes that would have made canceling easier, the complaint said.

Internally, Amazon called the process “Iliad,” a reference to the ancient Greek poem about lengthy siege of Troy during the Trojan war.

https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/06/21/amazon-prime-without-consent/

[–] 312@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

The examples in the FTC complaint are all well and good, and as I already said, Amazon sucks and their predatory practices are well-known, but this specific example, the one we’re talking about on this post, is pretty pedestrian.

If the OP were to post the 7-step process it takes to cancel a prime membership, that would be firmly and wholly in asshole design territory, I know, I’ve had to go through it myself. But just posting a screenshot of a mild upsell that has a clear set of binary options on opposite sides of the screen and saying “Amazon bad” doesn’t really contribute much - everyone knows Amazon sucks, and there are plenty of examples of them sucking, this just really isn’t a very good one.