The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design

Dark Patterns at Scale

“…Our study differs from prior work in two ways. First, while prior work has largely focused on creating taxonomies of the types of dark patterns either based on anecdotal data [31,32] or data collected from users' submissions [38,48], we provide large-scale evidence documenting the presence and prevalence of dark patterns in the wild. Automated measurements of this kind have proven useful in discovering various privacy and security issues on the web-including third-party tracking [25,40] and detecting vulnerabilities of remote third-party JavaScript libraries [68]-by documenting how and on which websites these issues manifest, thus enabling practical solutions to counter them.…”

“…Our taxonomy explains how dark patterns affects user decision-making based on their characteristics as well as the cognitive biases in users-deviations from rational behavior justified by some 'biased' line of reasoning [51]-they exploit to their advantage. We ground this taxonomy in the literature on online manipulation [34,77,83] and by studying the types of dark patterns highlighted in previous work [32,48]. Our taxonomy consists of the following five dimensions:…”

“…Dark patterns [32,48] are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making decisions that, if fully informed and capable of selecting alternatives, they might not make. Such interface design is an increasingly common occurrence on digital platforms including social media websites [46], shopping websites [32], mobile apps [5,31], and video games [85].…”

“…While prior work [31,32,38,48] has provided taxonomies to describe the existing types of dark patterns, there is no large-scale evidence documenting their prevalence, or a systematic and descriptive investigation of how the different types of dark patterns harm users. Collecting this information would allow us to first examine where, how often, and the technical means by which dark patterns appear; second, it would allow us to compare and contrast how various dark patterns influence users.…”

“…We use our web crawler to visit the ∼11K most popular shopping websites worldwide, create a large data set of dark patterns, and document their prevalence. Our data set contains several new instances and variations of previously documented dark patterns [32,48]. Finally, we use our taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics to classify and describe the patterns we discover.…”