Authors:
(1) Yuwen Lu, he contributed equally to this work, University of Notre Dame, USA;
(2) Chao Zhang, he contributed equally to this work and work done as a visiting researcher at the University of Notre Dame;
(3) Yuewen Yang, Work done as a visiting researcher at the University of Notre Dame;
(4) Yaxin Yao, Virginia Tech, USA;
(5) Toby Jia-Jun Li, University of Notre Dame, USA.
Table of Links
A APPENDIX
A.1 Co-Design Workshop Participant Demographics
Table 3. Demographics of the co-design workshop participants. This table includes participants’ ID, gender, age, education level, occupational domain, daily Internet usage, and whether they had heard of the concept “UX Dark Patterns”.
A.2 Themes Emerged from the Co-Design Workshops
Table 4. The top two levels of themes generated from our qualitative analysis for co-design workshops. The level-3 codes are not included due to the large quantity.
A.3 Dark Pattern Instance Details
Table 5. Dark pattern instances with types [11] and descriptions.
A.4 UI Enhancement Details
Table 6. UI enhancements with targeted dark patterns, intervention strategies, and descriptions.
A.5 Deployment Participant Demographics
Table 7. Demographics of the deployment study participants. This table includes participants’ ID, gender identity, age, education level, occupational domain, daily Chrome usage, and whether heard of “Dark Patterns in UX” or not.
A.6 Deployment Study Interview Protocols
We used the following protocols to conduct our three stages of interviews in our deployment studies. Follow-up questions were asked whenever the interviewer(s) saw fit.
A.6.1 Entry Interview (1 hour).
(1) Gather participants’ perceptions and experiences with dark patterns in daily lives
(a) Give a general introduction to dark patterns
(b) Ask participants about:
(i) websites they usually go to and the dark patterns there (Netflix, YouTube; Amazon; Twitter, Facebook)
(ii) the negative emotions, felt manipulation, self-autonomy loss, and the likelihood of being influenced when seeing these dark patterns
(2) Show participants some dark patterns and how to use Dark Pita to change them
(a) Tell participants that in our study we encourage them to:
(i) change a few dark patterns on the websites they use every day
(ii) come up with more UI design enhancement strategies they desire
(iii) send at least one diary note every 2 days
(iv) come up with more dark patterns they encounter on websites we don’t yet support
(b) Give participants our manual, containing information and Q&A on using our extension, and let them know how to contact us or ask questions
A.6.2 Check-in Interview (30 minutes).
(1) Check in with participants on their questions & issues during the past week using our extension
(2) Before the study, check any outlier in the participant’s user log or diary notes, make clarifications if needed
(3) Ask participants about the dark patterns they used our extension to change and ask their thoughts on:
(a) how do they think the change impacted their behavior on these websites?
(b) in the long term, which changes do you want to keep? Which ones do not? Why?
(c) Do you have any alternative enhancements for this dark pattern you desire?
(4) Did the participant find dark patterns on other websites?
(5) Remind participants of sending diary notes regularly
(6) Schedule a third interview session with the participant
A.6.3 Exit Interview (1 hour).
(1) Understand and clarify any outliers in user log data and diary notes
(2) Have the participant talk about their experiences with Dark Pita during the past 2 weeks, with them referencing the websites for more contexts
(3) More specifically, what dark patterns did they use Dark Pita to change?
(a) Why did the participant change it? How did the change impact their online experience?
(b) How did the change make the participant feel emotional?
(c) Which UI enhancement was the participant’s favorite? Why?
(4) What dark patterns did the participant not use Dark Pita to change?
(a) Why? Is it because of the dark pattern or the intervention?
(b) If it is the intervention, what intervention does the participant desire?
(5) Questions on educational values
(a) Did the participant learn anything new about dark patterns? If so, what are they?
(b) Anything else the participant did to learn more about dark patterns besides our study?
(i) Why? How did the participant get interested? What motivated them to learn more?
(ii) what experience they had, or which feature in Dark Pita made them want to learn more about dark patterns?
(iii) What new thoughts on dark patterns & intervention techniques did the participant have?
(6) Would the participant like to continue using the tool in the long term? Why?
(7) What change does the participant want to make in the future?
(8) Other general feedback?
A.7 Themes Emerged from the Deployment Study
Table 8. Qualitative analysis themes for the deployment study interviews. Themes from our second round of labeling were already comprehensive and our third round of labeling yielded only limited improvement over the second round. As a result, we simply used our second-round themes as level-1.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license.