Exploring End-User Empowerment Interventions for Dark Patterns in UX

Table of Links

Introduction

Background and Related Work

Co-Design Workshops

Technology Probe Study

Results

Scaling Up: A Research Agenda

Limitations and Future Work

Conclusions and References

Appendix

The study of UX dark patterns, i.e., UI designs that seek to manipulate user behaviors, often for the benefit of online services, has drawn significant attention in the CHI and CSCW communities in recent years. To complement previous studies in addressing dark patterns from (1) the designer’s perspective on education and advocacy for ethical designs; and (2) the policymaker’s perspective on new regulations, we propose an end-user-empowerment intervention approach that helps users (1) raise the awareness of dark patterns and understand their underlying design intents; (2) take actions to counter the effects of dark patterns using a web augmentation approach. Through a two-phase co-design study, including 5 co-design workshops (N=12) and a 2-week technology probe study (N=15), we reported findings on the understanding of users’ needs, preferences, and challenges in handling dark patterns and investigated the feedback and reactions to users’ awareness of and action on dark patterns being empowered in a realistic in-situ setting.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models; Empirical studies in interaction design.

Additional Key Words and Phrases: dark patterns, user experience, design ethics, end-user empowerment, web augmentation

ACM Reference Format:

Yuwen Lu, Chao Zhang, Yuewen Yang, Yaxing Yao, and Toby Jia-Jun Li. 2023. From Awareness to Action: Exploring End-User Empowerment Interventions for Dark Patterns in UX. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW, Article 1 (November 2023), 41 pages. https://doi.org/XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX

1 INTRODUCTION

Dark patterns [39] are user interface design choices that lead to certain decisions users might not otherwise make, often for the purpose of benefiting an online service [38, 40, 92]. Such dark patterns often result in user behaviors that are against the best interests of users e.g., pressured selling, video binge-watching, giving up personal data, and installing applications that they do not need [19, 26, 81]. Dark patterns vary in their complexity and impact. Ranging from subtle manipulative nudges [46] like non-consensual additions to shopping carts [82] and prioritized options [101], to overt deception like alarming virus alerts, these patterns have led to adverse user impacts, raising public awareness and prompting regulation [32, 127].

Most current efforts in addressing dark patterns take (1) the designer’s perspective on education and advocacy for ethical designs [38, 42, 89]; and (2) the policymaker’s perspective on new regulations [7, 65, 80]. For example, a CHI 2021 workshop titled “What can CHI do about dark patterns? [74]” was held to discuss how designers can address dark patterns and what changes designers can advocate for through interactions with stakeholders. Another instance is an act named “Deceptive Experiences To Online Users Reduction (DETOUR)” introduced to prohibit large online platforms from using dark patterns [32, 127]. However, these efforts often fell short of fully utilizing the autonomy of end users in self-protection [2, 13]. End users have strong incentives and the desire to protect themselves from online threats, but often lack the capacity and associated support [53, 75, 112, 136]. Moreover, dark patterns are generative and shapeshifting, thus will continuously evolve, making it difficult to fully define and regulate through policies. Therefore, to complement previous efforts, we take on an end-user-empowerment orientation in this paper to explore the design of interventions for dark patterns considering the autonomy of end users.

Guided by the Protection-Motivation Theory (PMT) [106], we coined two types of intervention for our end-user-empowerment approach, targeting users’ awareness and action. First, we enhance awareness by increasing transparency about the presence and impacts of dark patterns. Second, we enable users to take action against dark patterns, as previous studies have shown that awareness alone is not sufficient [11]. We employ a web augmentation approach, allowing users to select between pre-defined UI enhancements to dark patterns according to their preferences.

We also propose a Design-Behavior-Outcome framework, to map out the design space for UI enhancements in user action. This framework situates individual intervention techniques (e.g., hiding, disabling, friction, etc.) from previous work [11, 13, 17, 34, 57, 75, 89, 126] at different interaction phases between users and dark patterns. The resulting UI enhancements can change interface designs and user flows, or evoke users to reflect on the consequences caused by dark patterns.

To explore the design of our end-user-empowerment intervention for UX dark patterns, we conducted a two-phase co-design study. The first phase was five exploratory co-design workshops with 12 participants. We investigated user needs, challenges, and preferences in handling UX dark patterns. Through the workshops, we found that users have the desire to actively learn about dark patterns’ impact, and their perceptions and coping mechanisms of dark patterns are individualized and dynamically changing. They also expect to be able to counteract dark patterns by changing interfaces, adjusting user flows, and reflecting on behavioral outcomes.

Informed by the results of the first phase workshops, we further curated and deployed a technology probe study with 15 new participants for two weeks. The probe study aims to contextualize users in their everyday experience, investigate their feedback towards our approach throughout 2 weeks, and elicit more design implications for future end-user-empowerment interventions. We materialized our awareness and action interventions as a probe named Dark Pita[1] in the form of a browser extension against a representative sample of dark patterns in popular online services. The results showed that with our end-user empowerment approach, users gained transferable knowledge about dark patterns, felt empowered with autonomy over UIs, and chose UI enhancements to act against undesired dark patterns based on their dynamic, contextualized goals on different platforms.

Although the current version of Dark Pita is limited to handling a small sample of dark patterns with hand-crafted design enhancements, it exemplifies a new bottom-up end-user-empowerment approach. The study findings confirmed the effectiveness and presented useful design implications.

The paper also outlines a research roadmap towards scaling up our approach with development in user behavior modeling, interface semantic understanding, and citizen science platforms. We end this paper with a discussion on how the end-user-empowerment approach connects to the ongoing efforts in policy-making and advocacy for design ethics.

In summary, this paper makes the following contributions.

(1) A novel end-user-empowerment intervention approach for counteracting dark patterns in UX by enabling the end users of interfaces to recognize, understand, and take action upon dark patterns, including raising the transparency of dark patterns’ presence and impacts; and modifying dark patterns by switching between UI enhancements according to their own personal preferences and goals.

(2) Findings and design implications from a two-phase co-design study consisting of 5 co-design workshops (N=12) to explore users’ underlying needs, preferences, and challenges in handling dark patterns; and a 2-week technology probe study (N=15) to investigate users’ feedback and reactions to their awareness of and action on dark patterns being empowered in an everyday setting.

(3) An agenda for the research community to scale up this approach and deploy it in conjunction with ongoing efforts in crowd-sourced collective intelligence, citizen science, machine learning, policy making, and advocacy for design ethics.

[1] Dark Pita is an acronym for Dark Pattern Intervention for Transparency, and Accountability.