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Title: The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1657310
PAR ID:
10057203
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '18
Page Range / eLocation ID:
Paper No. 534
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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