Dark Patterns Detective: I Made a Game to Spot Sneaky Design!
A Fun and Interactive Way to Level Up Your Digital Street Smarts
I'm keeping this post short because I'm too excited to share what I've built with you!
Dark Patterns Detective is an interactive mini-game that teaches you how to spot manipulative design tricks online. It's fun, free, and takes less than 10 minutes to complete!
You know that moment when you're helping your parents with a website and you catch yourself saying "Oh, don't click that – it's trying to trick you"? That's exactly what inspired me to build it.
🎮 Try it out here for free: darkpatternsgame.productartistry.com
Video demo of one of the lessons in action:
After spending time as a product manager in the cyber risk space (and being a huge Don Norman fan), I've gotten pretty good at spotting these manipulative design patterns. But watching my parents navigate the web recently made me realize just how much of this knowledge I take for granted.
Instead of just writing about it, I thought: "Why not make something interactive that actually teaches people to spot these tricks?" It was also the perfect excuse to learn TypeScript properly – nothing beats building something real to level up your skills!
The game has 10 quick lessons that:
Train your eye to catch manipulative design tricks
Show you how these patterns mess with your brain
Give you practical ways to avoid getting caught by them
What you'll learn:
How to spot hidden costs before checkout
Ways companies use FOMO to pressure you
Tricks that make it hard to cancel subscriptions
Common tactics that exploit your attention
Practical defense strategies you can use daily
🎮 Play now: darkpatternsgame.productartistry.com
I've started many side projects before, but the accountability of writing this newsletter helped me see this one through to completion. I'm really proud of how it turned out and excited to share it with you all!
Would love to hear what you think (or of any bugs you find 🙃)! And since it's educational, feel free to share it with anyone who might benefit from it or just find it interesting.
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Keep Iterating,
—Rohan
I've just played around with it, this looks great, Rohan!! I like how you nudge people with hints, but also play around with so many different dark mode-dark-intended concepts to mind-trick us. I'm glad (am I??) that I actually knew them all, which is why I generally dislike any type of internet deals.
Have you considered posting this as a Monday-submission project on Peerlist? Peerlist just rolled out their dark mode to selected people on a limited-beta release (which I was a part of) and I'm usually not one of dark mode. They've been trying to be really mindful with the whole dark mode development, so this might highly resonate with them!
I'm in no way affiliated with Peerlist apart from truly enjoying the platform, and it's like Product Hunt, but a smaller social media, and it has really a lot of UX/UI designers and devs that love these topics!
I recommend you to check it out, you might enjoy it! https://peerlist.io/franciscacasais/signup :)