| Deceiving, tricking and pressuring users into taking actions. For example, LinkedIn having a flow that has an e-mail and password box, which will get a less attentive user to just re-enter their LinkedIn credentials. But it's actually a phishing form for your e-mail, so if your LinkedIn and e-mail password is the same, you have now "consented" to have your address book scraped and your contacts spammed. Or, in the case of Booking.com: * Every step has items designed to pressure you to book NOW because it'll be too late otherwise: - "booked x times in the last x hours" on the listing, or - "Only 1 room left!" (they now add "on our site" after they lost a consumer protection lawsuit) - Showing booked-out listings "You missed it" - Various notifications like "last booked X minutes ago" and "limited supply" popping in while you're scrolling to raise the pressure * Misleading or deceptive claims - "Jackpot, this is the cheapest price you've seen" (emphasis should be on "you've seen", this will be shown even if you look at overpriced properties) - They seem to have stopped the "one person looking at this property" thing (to make you think that it may be gone if you don't book now - that one person is you), probably after being forced to do so by court - a misleading rating system (the lowest possible rating is 2.5/10, and you rate category-by-category, which means that if the staff is friendly and the hotel is in a good location etc. but the rats and cockroaches ate your luggage while you slept, that's an 8/10 property - in practice, you should assume that anything below 8 is not good, below 7.5 is bad, below 7 is catastrophic, below 6 you may not survive) - I'd also assume that they mess with the reviews in various ways, like showing mostly positive ones etc., but I haven't verified that. Overall, I like to compare the booking experience with a drill sergeant yelling into your ear to convert (book) right now, NOW, DO IT, NOW, YOU MAGGOT! They seem to have improved significantly over previous experiences with them, probably due to a combination of me getting used to ignore the yelling, or because they realized that such a bad experience pushes customers away, or because their practices got banned one by one. It's a shame, because other than the drill sergeant, their site is great. |