The dark (patterns) side of UX design

CM Gray, Y Kou, B Battles, J Hoggatt… - Proceedings of the 2018 …, 2018 - dl.acm.org
CM Gray, Y Kou, B Battles, J Hoggatt, AL Toombs
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2018dl.acm.org
Interest in critical scholarship that engages with the complexity of user experience (UX)
practice is rapidly expanding, yet the vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in
practice is currently lacking. In this paper, we outline and explore the limits of a specific
ethical phenomenon known as" dark patterns," where user value is supplanted in favor of
shareholder value. We assembled a corpus of examples of practitioner-identified dark
patterns and performed a content analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in …
Interest in critical scholarship that engages with the complexity of user experience (UX) practice is rapidly expanding, yet the vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in practice is currently lacking. In this paper, we outline and explore the limits of a specific ethical phenomenon known as "dark patterns," where user value is supplanted in favor of shareholder value. We assembled a corpus of examples of practitioner-identified dark patterns and performed a content analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in these examples. This analysis revealed a wide range of ethical issues raised by practitioners that were frequently conflated under the umbrella term of dark patterns, while also underscoring a shared concern that UX designers could easily become complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. We conclude with implications for the education and practice of UX designers, and a proposal for broadening research on the ethics of user experience.
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