User Interface Murks - Apple preys on vulnerable users
Designing and building user interfaces for software is hard. Really hard. And yes, even very large companies with lots of resources can get this very wrong.
Time to learn a new German word: Murks. The closest english term is "botched". In this blog, we will show you such cases, and what can be done to fix them, both from the developers point of view, as well as from the user perspective.
Episode 2 - Apple preys on vulnerable iOS users
After updating an iPhone to iOS 14, I was very dismayed to see this screen here when I launched the Wallet.app from Apple:
Instead of showing my tickets, Apples Wallet.app now displays massive spam for their "Apple Pay" service. There is no way to remove that unwelcome advertising. And what is worse, I cannot really see nor use my tickets at that time, which is the only reason of existence for the Wallet.app!
Fortunately, you can still "slide up" the actual tickets from the bottom of that screen, if you manage to do that instead of getting to the control center, which also activates with a swipe up.
Also, there is almost no visual clue that your valuable tickets are actually still there. A very few pixels at the bottom of the screen, in real life much harder to detect than on the screenshot shown here.
Spamming an application with advertising is something that many vendors do a lot, and it is annoying already. But the situation here is much more serious, because Wallet is part of iOS, and when you use it, you are normally in a hurry, to show up your plane ticket at the gate, or concert ticket at the venue, and you are in a very vulnerable state and in a hurry. And what is more, there are no alternatives, as every user can only use the iOS Wallet.app for electronic tickets.
The fact that Apple thinks it is a good idea to prey on you in this very vulnerable moment is disgusting and unacceptable.
This is what is called a "dark interface pattern". Apple is using a moment of vulnerability to prey on you, to sell their "Apple Pay" service to you. It is despicable that Apple seems to be needing this bad kind of spamming for that product.
Oh, and despite posting multiple reports in Apples shiny "Feedback Reporter", this dark pattern is still in iOS 15.2.
Shame on you, Apple! You must remove that spam immediately!
What can we do?
As users, please login to Apples bug reporter, https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/
Tell Apple in clear words what you think of this spam, and the fact that there is no way of removing this unwanted advertising, and that this is a "dark pattern". Maybe they will understand and remove this soon.
At least, they should reduce the size of this ad, so you can actually really see your tickets underneath it. But this would still be preying, and shameful for Apple.
Further reading
A great book about "dark interface patterns" is "Hooked" by Nir Eyal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern
A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"