The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design
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The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design Colin M. Gray, Yubo Kou, Bryan Battles, Joseph Hoggatt, and Austin L. Toombs Purdue University West Lafayette, IN {gray42; kou2; bbattles; jhoggatt; toombsa}@purdue.edu ABSTRACT We focus specifically on the practitioner-created construct of Interest in critical scholarship that engages with the complex- "dark patterns" and its emergence in the practitioner lexicon, ity of user experience (UX) practice is rapidly expanding, defining a co-opting of human-centered values in the service yet the vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality in of deceptive or malicious aims. practice is currently lacking. In this paper, we outline and While ethics and values have been studied extensively in the explore the limits of a specific ethical phenomenon known HCI and Science & Technology Studies (STS) literature (e.g., as "dark patterns," where user value is supplanted in favor of value levers [63], values at play [25], critical design [10,7, 23], shareholder value. We assembled a corpus of examples of reflective design [60, 61]), these conversations are frequently practitioner-identified dark patterns and performed a content bound to the academic community and related discourses, analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in these making practitioner access to these conversations difficult and examples. This analysis revealed a wide range of ethical issues activation of their implications problematic. While there are raised by practitioners that were frequently conflated under clear uptakes from these conversations for UX practice, it is the umbrella term of dark patterns, while also underscoring a unclear whether these methods or approaches are used in UX shared concern that UX designers could easily become com- practice to raise or foreground awareness of criticality, an issue plicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. which is complicated by a tenuous relationship between the We conclude with implications for the education and practice academic and practitioner communities surrounding the use of UX designers, and a proposal for broadening research on of methods and knowledge [18, 37, 36, 52]. the ethics of user experience. We use the term dark patterns to define instances where design- ACM Classification Keywords ers use their knowledge of human behavior (e.g., psychology) H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): and the desires of end users to implement deceptive function- Miscellaneous; K.7.4. Professional ethics: Codes of ethics. ality that is not in the user’s best interest [17, 38]. While Author Keywords understudied in the HCI literature (see [38] for one rare ex- Dark patterns; ethics; design character; design responsibility; ample), the popular press (e.g., [58, 65, 71]) and practitioners UX practice; practice-led research. (e.g., [16, 41, 59]) have latched onto this term as a means of discussing the danger of manipulative design practices, and INTRODUCTION often as a proxy for broader discussions of ethical and value- There is increasing interest in critical aspects of HCI and UX centered practice. These discussions appear to have broad practice in the CHI community, including engagement with relevance for the HCI community, both in grounding critical the impact of technology and design on society (e.g., [5, 22]) discussions in a practice-led way, and in activating concepts and the role of the designer in bringing about responsible relevant to critical views of practice through specific instances. change, particularly for vulnerable populations (e.g., [20, 39, In this study, we ground our understanding of dark patterns 74]). While the third paradigm of HCI has taken up critical- in the artifacts and conversations of UX practitioners. First, ethical concerns as a key aspect of humanistically-inspired we generated a corpus of exemplars that were shared by prac- praxis [8, 40], the everyday practice of designers in relation titioners as indicative of dark patterns in action. Second, we to these concerns has not been sufficiently studied. We take analyzed this corpus to reveal the kinds of ethically-dubious be- on a practice-led orientation in this paper to understand more haviors that could be linked to dark patterns, both on a surface fully how practitioners are already engaging in and conceptu- level, and in relation to which design features and interactions alizing social responsibility in their work on their own terms. were most ethically salient. We then cross-referenced these be- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or haviors with instances from the critical HCI and STS literature classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation to reveal opportunities for further research and investigation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the in both the academic and practitioner communities. author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission The contributions of this work are three-fold: 1) we describe and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. and analyze instances of dark patterns, grounding and clari- CHI 2018, April 21–26, 2018, Montreal, QC, Canada fying this practitioner-defined phenomenon for an academic © 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-5620-6/18/04. $15.00 audience; 2) we set an agenda for further study of the ethical DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108 dimensions of UX practice, including instances where manipu- extended as part of HCI’s turn to the cultural through concep- lation, deception, and unwarranted levels of persuasion might tual applications such as transgression, boundaries, consent, appear in emergent technologies and forms of interaction; and withdrawal, data, and integrity. Frauenberger et al. [28] have 3) we identify the implications of dark patterns in relation to also done recent work in this space, challenging static and for- the ethical responsibilities of UX practitioners, including their malized notions of ethics in HCI; diverging from the practice understanding and performance of values. focus of Shilton and colleagues, Frauenberger et al. identify mechanisms for raising ethical issues in more situated and ETHICS IN THE DESIGN OF USER EXPERIENCE exploratory ways within the HCI research tradition. Numerous framings of ethics and values have been explored in the HCI community and beyond in the last two decades Critical and Reflective Design (e.g., [7, 25, 27, 28, 30, 60, 62, 64]). Many methods and Alongside humanist and value-based approaches to inquiry in research approaches to design (e.g., critical design, reflective HCI, critical design has emerged as a means of foregrounding design, adversarial design) take on an ethical standpoint, but ethical and societal concerns through design and interpretive these efforts have historically been largely focused on the practices [10,9, 56]. Critical design builds upon traditional development of scholarship, with less clear implications for design practices, but rather than resulting in artifacts that af- "everyday" commercial UX design. While many of these firm current societal norms, the designer creates artifacts or constructive approaches have been shown to be effective in a experiences that allow key societal norms and values to be research context as a generative tool to understand the ethical openly interpreted and questioned [21]. Bardzell et al. [10, implications of designs, none have been rigorously tested in 9] have previously proposed an approach to analyzing critical professional practice or educational settings for their efficacy designs, building upon both a corpus of exemplars [23] and in increasing ethical awareness and decision-making. Even patterns of humanistic interpretation [8] to foreground criti- fewer of these methods have been disseminated to practitioners cal dimensions of these artifacts. However, these approaches in ways that resonate with method use "on the ground" [34], require substantial skill of interpretation that must be honed resulting in a lack of adoption and impact. over time, and there is little evidence that this method of pro- ducing or interpreting critical artifacts has been taken up by We will briefly summarize the dominant ethics or value-related the practitioner community. methods or approaches to further explore how HCI and STS scholars have addressed this space in differing ways. Sengers et al. [60] have proposed the reflective design method, which allows the design team to activate criticality within the Value-Sensitive Methods user research process, improving elicitation of tacit knowledge Several groups of scholars have proposed methods that fore- and encouraging defamiliarized or otherwise novel user and ground values at varying points in the design process. Value- designer perspectives on existing interactions. Reflective de- Sensitive Design (VSD) has been one of the most comprehen- sign has been used to increase awareness of underlying social sive frameworks developed to address the question of values in tensions or constraints that may have value for further design design, described by its creators as "a theoretically grounded activity, however it is unclear how often this method is used approach to the