· 2018
The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design
- 797citations
- 2018year
Short summary
UX designers risk complicity in manipulative practices due to a lack of vocabulary for ethical critique, as revealed by a content analysis of practitioner-identified 'dark patterns'.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Practitioner-identified 'dark patterns' raise a wide range of ethical concerns.
- UX designers are worried about becoming complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices.
- There is a lack of vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in UX practice.
- User value is often supplanted in favor of shareholder value.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
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.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2018 · DOI ↗
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Field: Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer InteractionComputer Science