UX Pattern Anti-Pattern Checker
Flag the dark patterns eroding trust, and your long-term conversion.
3 dark patterns is a trust liability, and increasingly a legal one under consumer-protection rules. Short-term conversions bought this way cost more in refunds, churn and brand damage than they earn.
Dark patterns inflate the metric you optimise and degrade the ones you don't measure, trust, retention and word of mouth. They're also increasingly regulated.
About this calculator
Manipulative UX patterns can lift a short-term metric while quietly costing you refunds, chargebacks, churn, and reviews you never connect back to the original design decision. This checker runs your experience against eight well-documented dark patterns, forced continuity, hidden costs, confirmshaming, and more, and gives you an integrity score plus a trust-risk read.
How to use it
- Tick any dark pattern currently present in your experience: forced continuity, hidden costs revealed late, confirmshaming, disguised ads or fake system messages, hard-to-find cancellation, fake urgency, pre-selected paid add-ons, or trick button wording.
- Read the count of patterns found, the integrity score, and the trust-risk level.
- Treat any flagged pattern as a priority removal, not just a design nitpick, several carry regulatory exposure as well as reputational cost.
Methodology
The integrity score is (total patterns minus flagged patterns) ÷ total patterns × 100, so each of the eight patterns is weighted equally and removing any one improves the score by the same fixed increment.
Zero patterns found is graded "good" with low trust risk, 1-2 patterns "warn" with moderate risk, and 3+ "bad" with high risk, reflecting that these patterns compound: a page with several dark patterns creates cumulative distrust well beyond what any single pattern causes alone.
This is a presence checklist, not a measured impact on churn or chargebacks, it flags known problematic patterns; the actual cost to your business depends on your specific audience, market, and applicable consumer-protection regulation.
FAQ
Not universally, but several (deceptive cancellation flows, hidden costs, pre-selected paid add-ons) fall under increasingly active consumer-protection enforcement in the US, EU, and UK. Even where a specific pattern isn't clearly illegal in your jurisdiction, regulatory scrutiny of dark patterns broadly is rising.
Dark patterns typically work by exploiting a moment of inattention or urgency, confirmshaming lifts opt-in rate, hidden costs reduce cart abandonment at the moment they're hidden. The cost shows up later and elsewhere, in refund requests, chargebacks, support tickets, and reviews, which is why the short-term metric looks good while the underlying trust erodes.
Genuine urgency (a real, verifiable low-stock count or an actual deadline) is legitimate persuasion. It becomes a dark pattern when the countdown resets, the stock number is fabricated, or the deadline isn't real, the deception, not the urgency framing itself, is what the checker flags.