TY - GEN
T1 - The dark (patterns) side of UX design
AU - Gray, Colin M.
AU - Kou, Yubo
AU - Battles, Bryan
AU - Hoggatt, Joseph
AU - Toombs, Austin L.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2018/4/20
Y1 - 2018/4/20
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85046967467&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85046967467&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3173574.3174108
DO - 10.1145/3173574.3174108
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85046967467
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2018 - Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2018
Y2 - 21 April 2018 through 26 April 2018
ER -