this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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AssholeDesign

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This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.

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Marketing should always be OPT-IN by default, but these extra steps to opt out is truly asshole design.

Oh, and on the opt-out confirmation screen, you get two options: Yes or No. The button colour for "yes" is white, and the “no” button matches the “save” button on the previous screen, so it's easy to accidentally cancel the opt-out. Double-asshole design!

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If this is the marketing opt-out screen you know damn well they're selling everything they can about your purchase and banking histories. I would change to a credit union post haste.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

On of my banking apps fails to open when I disallow connections to graph.facebook.com. Their support team has indicated that it's not their app. I have logs from various vpn-like capture apps, and my firewall. Pretty icky.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

It's crazy because banks were so uptight about security (rooted phones) when it comes to tap and pay.

But they'll just throw facebook into the equation without a 2nd thought.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I would change to a credit union post haste.

Unfortunately, our local credit union would end up costing a lot more per month in fees than the "free" account I have with data mining. LOL

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I do not understand this, I don’t recall ever having seen bank/CU accounts that cost money.

Hell my credit union pays me like 2-5% on my checking account, can’t remember and CBF to look it up, and like 3%on my savings.

I have had checking accounts without interest before, but never one I had to pay for, and I am not using shady online banks either, mine are legit respected ones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I don’t recall ever having seen bank/CU accounts that cost money.

What country??

In Canada, there are only a few banks that I'm aware of that offer free accounts. Many are online only and end up being really limited.

Our local credit union has several personal accounts, and they either start at $10 a month or "free" but they charge for every ATM transaction, deposit, e-transfer, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I looked it up and couldn't find one that fit my needs. Many of them lack a way to get cash or cheques which unfortunately is still occasionally needed. (I probably write/deposit ~5 cheques a year). I would also want to switch to one that has TOTP based 2FA but that seems to be none of them, but I would never switch to one that requires SMS or custom app based 2FA (which seems to be most of them).

Man, banking is one of the things I really miss about living in Europe.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I would also want to switch to one that has TOTP based 2FA

As far as I know, there isn't a single bank in Canada that offers this. Extremely frustrating and impossible to trust any bank with my money if they don't even take security seriously.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

Murica! 🦅🎆🎇

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

How do you find a legit respectable credit union? I see so many but it's not like banks where the popular ones are household names. (United States)

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Inbound calls? Outbound calls? I would not want to sit through an ad instead of being put straight through to a bank rep to report a missing card or some other important issue

This kind of stuff should be 100% opt in as you say!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Inbound calls? Outbound calls? I would not want to sit through an ad instead of being put straight through to a bank rep to report a missing card or some other important issue

Hopefully, it also includes the “upsell” when you do call for something. Like, after the problem is resolved, “we have some other products you might be interested in.”. I don't want to hear about anything that I'm not asking about.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Seriously. My checking account bank has a very small number of jobs:

  1. Recieve my paycheck.
  2. Transfer money where I say.
  3. Occasionally deposit/withdraw cheques or bills.
  4. Tell me how much money of mine you have.

I don't want any new features.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Simplii is the name in the picture, but I don’t know who that is.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Bingo. It's Simplii Financial (Canada). They are owned by CIBC, the fifth-largest bank in Canada.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago

you don't have a bank, you have a direct marketing company that knows the password to your checking account

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (2 children)

As a developer this seems like a lot of extra work. I would assume that this was a supervisor's idea.

But I wouldn't necessarily consider giving the customer every possible option a bad choice. Giving customers the ability to fine tune their email notifications is really a bonus feature.

However, this is a horrible design choice to display 3 pages of multiple options. It's an asshole design.

It would be pretty easy to group them into a drop down list where multiples in that category can be selected or deselected with a couple of toggles.

I would assume this was some genius executive decision, but there's a very small chance it was a stupid design choice. Regardless the designer will always be blamed.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

This is not a supervisor,it's the Marketing director... Believe me this is 1000000% intentional.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

All I wanted as an "opt out of all" option and that's that. This was done on purpose, no doubt. They also had a redesign of the app many months ago, which made is incredibly hard to use because of the color scheme. I can imagine some people with accessibility issues are simply not able to use the app now.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

If only I lived in the EU!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Which bank so that people can avoid it?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'd opt out of that bank if they did this to me.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I'm fortunate that they give me the option to opt out of pretty much any and all forms of marketing, but Jesus Christ, it shouldn't take a half hour to do it!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Ah yes, I got this email today as well. Absolutely user-hostile. Not only is every opt-out 4 clicks (opt-in is only 3) the categories are very confusing and unclear. Some of them just sound like you are opting out of all email communication which I don't want to do unless they actually have something important to tell me (however unlikely). I would also bet $1k that by this time next year they have either opted me back in without consent or added a new category that is default-enabled.

Along with their switch to SMS 2 factor (no option for TOTP and they removed the email option they used to have) I am seriously considering switching. The problem is that every other bank seems worse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that every other bank seems worse.

And that's the problem. Literally no good options.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Much of the bullshit they're doing aside, I'd kill to have that much granularity in notification preferences on various services. Too many times it's an "all-or-nothing" situation. The more specific I can get, the better.

Edit: actually, I just realized that they don't even give any real options for each communication method. Nevermind lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I got the same thing, and I suspect this is their "malicious compliance" way of dealing with some new rule about needing to let people opt out of marketing. There are 33 separate settings.

At least now I can probably leave their app's notifications enabled for 2FA without also getting marketing notifications.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I think it was LinkedIn I remember seeing also did this, right before I uninstalled the app. NextDoor does something like this but not 3 pages worth. The harder it is, the less people that will do it - and the companies doing this know that!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's like when you try to stop Android autodeleting app data for all my apps when I don't use them in 3 months (I have plenty of storage, and I don't want this stuff gone if I lose internet). You have to click on Settings > Apps > All apps, and for each app, click on it, scroll down, toggle the 'delete all app data after 3 months of inactivity' button, go back, repeat for all ~150 apps, remember to do this whenever I install/reinstall an app, and sometimes the settings just seems to randomly revert and I find my app data has been deleted, and then I need to manually check each app again, because Google didn't consider that people might want to turn this 'feature' of for every app at once, or at least have a list of toggles, rather than having to go into the app settings for each app.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

That's awful! Is it stock android? I'm not seeing the option on my Samsung phone, but I'm also on Android 12 😮‍💨

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Maybe Samsung removed it in favor of their own app pauser.

This is what I see on a normal Pixel phone

Personally I don't have much issue with it, as I usually uninstall apps that my phone points out are going unused. In reality, I want zero apps and to just use the mobile web for everything but that's not possible due to dark patterns.

Cough Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Reddit cough cough

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm honestly not sure what they are talking about, I'm on Android 14 on my s23 and that isn't a feature, nor has it ever been on any android phone I've ever had or seen. There is an option to remove permissions for apps that have not been used, but not to delete all storage for an app after an amount of time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

s23

Samsung. Yep. That's your problem there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

No? It's literally not a thing on any android. I just pretty extensively looked for any evidence of this online and I can only see people misunderstanding the feature of removing permissions for unused apps. One of the permissions apps are granted is storage, and that permission can get revoked if that feature is turned on. This does not delete stored data (it does not remove data the app has already written) but removes the apps ability to read or write to storage further, and can cause any temporary storage like cache to get erased. This will cause your accounts to get signed out and could potentially lead to data loss, but not because the operating system is actively and purposefully erasing data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I was just talking about Samsung phones being a problem in general. Fuck Samsung.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, Motorola Android is basically stock, right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. I've only ever owned a lower end Motorola android phone, and it only had minimal tweaks to vanilla android. But I've never heard of this feature on other phones, so I wonder if it's a Motorola feature/tweak and not and Android one.

It wouldn't make it any better, since that sounds like a terrible feature to have automatically enabled!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

It's an Android feature, added in 13.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

At least it allows you to opt-out... as opposed to not at all:-(.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I'm quite thankful that the option, especially with the granularity, is offered. But they really could have made it user-friendly by having an "opt into all" and "opt out of all" in addition to these individual settings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Nope. They get more profits if they do it this way, or even if they do not, the manager in charge WANTS it this way or else it would be different. Wishing otherwise does not make it so, unfortuantely:-(.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I'm to the point that certain industries should be prohibited from doing ANY 3rd party marketing. Finance and health at a bare minimum. I have financial information protection rights and medical information protection rights. Literally 0 information should be shared by my bank. Just as much should be shared by my insurer or medical providers. Just... No. Not my app usage habits, not my "anonomized" habit data, nothing.