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UI Dark Patterns and Where to Find Them: A Study on Mobile Applications and User Perception

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

A Dark Pattern (DP) is an interface maliciously crafted to deceive users into performing actions they did not mean to do. In this work, we analyze Dark Patterns in 240 popular mobile apps and conduct an online experiment with 589 users on how they perceive Dark Patterns in such apps. The results of the analysis show that 95% of the analyzed apps contain one or more forms of Dark Patterns and, on average, popular applications include at least seven different types of deceiving interfaces. The online experiment shows that most users do not recognize Dark Patterns, but can perform better in recognizing malicious designs if informed on the issue. We discuss the impact of our work and what measures could be applied to alleviate the issue.

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    CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2020
    10688 pages
    ISBN:9781450367080
    DOI:10.1145/3313831
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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    Published: 23 April 2020

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    1. dark patterns
    2. ethical design
    3. user experiments

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    • (2024)Identifying Dark Patterns in User Account Disabling Interfaces: Content Analysis ResultsSocial Media + Society10.1177/2056305123122426910:1Online publication date: 27-Jan-2024
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