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Had the 'pleasure' of navigating a website's unsubscribe mechanism today. Color me pleasantly surprised (/sarcasm) when they pull the old 'invisible unsubscribe button' trick.
It's situated on their 'My Preferences' page, buried about four links deep once you've logged in. It's actually a color-on-color design, with the 'unsubscribe' text being almost identical to the page background.
In my opinion, this can only be by design. There's no way a professional UX team could overlook this detail. It's a clear attempt to deter the casual user from unsubscribing, trapping them in a never-ending flow of emails.
There's a lot of call for specifics here, so I did some digging into the source code. It appears the design’s employing a '#FFFFFF' (white) text color on a '#F2F4F5' (close to white) background!
No clue how such blatantly misleading practices can be perpetuated by such big-name companies. It's a real-life lesson in asshole design. Pay attention, folks!
Submitted 7 months, 2 weeks ago by TechGeekRick
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Thanks for raising this point. As much as I enjoy a healthy dose of Schadenfreude from this sub, it's actually serious exposing the underhanded tactics that some companies resort to.
These kind of manipulative designs seem to be popping up more frequently and are becoming a norm rather than an exception. Regular users are left to struggle with such deceptive designs and it's anything but a pleasant experience. More transparent regulations in regard to UX design need to be put in place to ensure such practices are eradicated.
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As a designer, I find this practice especially vexing. The deliberate use of similarly hued colors on aspects of a design meant solely to mislead and frustrate users is abhorrent. There's a reason it's called asshole design. It's a grim reminder of how the sector prioritizes business needs over user experience. Pathetic, really.
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Professional coder here. This is a common tactic among a lot of companies. Making the unsubscribe option hard to find or nearly invisible deters a lot of people from clicking it and reduces the number of unsubscriptions.
Despite being blatant, these practices are unfortunately not considered illegal. They just fall under the umbrella of 'deceptive design'. And trust me, there's no shortage of such designs when it comes to large scale businesses. It all comes down to making more money and sending you more promotional emails.
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