Help make online shopping better

You know the feeling: you’re making an important online purchase — maybe buying an appliance or booking a holiday — and you’re feeling nervous and a bit daunted by the sheer cost and commitment. To help you make a good choice, you send the page to your friend or your mum or your partner for a second opinion, but it’s taking forever for them to get back to you, so you browse away from the app and look at something else while you’re waiting. 

And then you notice something’s different.

Suddenly there’s some tiny red writing that says, “Hurry! Only 1 left at this price.”

Only 1 left! What if it goes? What about the hours spent worrying and comparing prices and warranties and cancellation periods – will they all be wasted? So, feeling a bit flustered, you click “buy now’, because if there’s only 4 left, one of them may as well be yours. 

This kind of tactic – also known as a “deceptive design pattern” – is one of the online consumer traps Citizens Advice would like to see covered by new regulation that ensures we all benefit from better experiences online. I’m working with the policy team to help shape and gather recommendations for how that regulation might work, and – if you’re a digital designer – we need your help. 

Citizens Advice are currently conducting public research to understand more about consumers’ experience of a number of design patterns that influence how we behave when buying things online. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) call this “Online Choice Architecture”, and. have identified a number of patterns in online shopping experiences that intentionally create an artificial sense of scarcity or confusion, making it more difficult for us to make informed choices. These patterns include subscription traps (see designer Caroline Sinders’ exploration of how hard it can be to unsubscribe from online brands), drip pricing, countdown timers, hidden fees and intentionally complex language and visual cues that make it hard to understand what’s really on offer. 

Diagram from the Competition and Markets Authority, showing how Online Choice Architecture interacts with other concepts from behavioural science

These patterns have real consequences. Research by Citizens Advice in 2022 has shown these “tricks of the trade” are result in a bad deal for people who shop online: 27% of consumers have regretted something they bought online, 24% have ended up spending more than they expected to, and a further 26% of consumers feel they spent an excessive amount of time trying to find information about their purchase. The consequences of these patterns can be more severe for people experiencing other forms of vulnerability and marginalisation, and in a cost of living crisis they represent an additional set of hoops to jump through for everyone who needs to make their money go further.

The CMA’s thinking about these kinds of design patterns has so far been based on concepts from behavioural science, and they’ve collected evidence of a range of “nudge and sludge” prompts that collectively represent the worst of design practices: patterns that aim to manipulate and confuse in order to make money. But it doesn’t have to be that way! In fact “making life better by design” is part of the Design Council’s purpose.

Making life better by design

To this end, at the bottom of this page we’re collecting examples of positive patterns for online shopping – examples where good digital design for e-commerce and online shopping has made things better and easier for more people to do things like:

• save money or lower the cost of a shopping basket

• make an informed decision

• make comparisons

• cancel or unsubscribe from a service 

• make a decision with another person 

Design is a powerful force for good, so it’s important that any coming regulatory measures don’t simply mitigate for the worst kinds of exploitation. In a quickly changing, data-driven digital landscape, it’s also vital to build data sets that good looks like, so that more people demand it, more people can draw on it, and more business models draw on it. 

So, this is where we need you: we need designers to help us start to build the basis of a pattern library of positive design patterns for online shopping and e-commerce. If you’ve got an example, please submit it using the form below.

How will we use it?

The Pattern Library is part of a wider programme of advocacy for better outcomes for people who shop online.

If you would like to keep in touch with the programme and attend our virtual roundtable on 14 July 2023, please contact Emily Lynne at Citizens Advice on emily.lynn@citizensadvice.org.uk.