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.
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#darkpatterns: UX Practitioner Conversations About Ethical Design
There is increasing interest in the role that ethics plays in UX practice, however current guidance is largely driven by formalized frameworks and does not adequately describe "on the ground" practitioner conversations regarding ethics. In this late-breaking work, we identified and described conversations about a specific ethical phenomenon on Twitter using the hashtag #darkpatterns. We then determined the authors of these tweets and analyzed the types of artifacts or links they shared. We found that UX practitioners were most likely to share tweets with this hashtag, and that a majority of tweets either mentioned an artifact or "shames" an organization that engages in manipulative UX practices. We identify implications for building an enhanced understanding of pragmatist ethics from a practitioner perspective.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657310
- PAR ID:
- 10057223
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI EA '18 Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Paper No. LBW082
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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