[Music]
Moien I'm Arianna. Moien, I'm Kerstin.
And we are researchers at the university
of luxembourg. Lately we have been
researching manipulative designs in
online interfaces.
Namely dark patterns, those interface
designs that push people
to spend money on products they didn't
intend to buy
spend way too much time on a service or
to give away their personal data.
And this is why we asked what can be
done about dark patterns.
But before thinking about interventions,
we believe it's important to understand
how users actually perceive dark
patterns.
So for example, are users actually aware
of manipulative designs online and their
influence on their behaviour?
And also when users encounter
manipulative designs online,
are they able to recognise them? And what
if people are aware and able to
recognise them,
would they still be influenced by dark
patterns in their behaviour?
This is why we decided to run a user
study and we're going to show you what
we did.
Here's our study design. We start with
a first part where we showed the
participants
three statement pairs to measure their
awareness
of dark patterns in online interfaces.
They were supposed to rate each pair on
a five point
Likert scale and after this first part
we moved to second part,
to gather some demographic
information.
Among others the frequency of online
service use.
And then in the third part we
designed a game
that we call the "spot the dark pattern".
We showed
a series of interface designs to our
participants
taken from real examples but freed of
any reference to a brand.
And we asked them whether they would
find any manipulative design
element inside of these examples.
This one forces users to consent to use a service
and this uses a very confusing wording
to tell the users
how they can opt out of marketing
notifications. We showed
those interfaces only for a few seconds
and then
people had to write down what
manipulative elements they found.
After going through all the examples
they got an explanation for the dark
patterns
in the interfaces and then they had to
rate again
on a five-point Likert scale whether
they thought the
pattern was influential or not on their
behaviour
and whether they thought it's a
tolerable strategy or rather not.
So let's see what we have found out.
We managed to gather answers from 406
participants
and it's a representative sample of the
UK population in terms of age, gender, and
ethnicity.
Thank you prolific. If you remember
our first research
question asked whether people are aware
of manipulative designs in online
environments.
So what did we find out? Let's have a
look.
These are the three statements that
people had to rate from
"I don't agree at all" too "I totally agree".
And we see that
people agree. They are quite aware that
manipulative online interfaces
exist. However, they are uncertain
whether these can cause them harm and
they don't seem too worried about it.
We asked them to rate these statements for
themselves but also for people in
general.
And running a two-sided Sign test,
we could actually see a significant
difference in between the ratings.
So we see that they are aware but even
more aware that
interfaces that manipulate people can
influence other people
more than themselves. Can cause other
people
more harm than themselves and they are
worried for other people
but not so much for themselves. Which is
not surprising,
I mean a lot of risk behaviour works in
the same way. So
the problem is that people think that
other people are more vulnerable to
certain risks than themselves.
For what concerns research question
number two, we asked whether people
were able to recognise dark patterns in
the examples that we showed them.
What did we find out? So first of all,
we qualitatively coded all the answers
for our examples and we coded whether
participants recognised the dark pattern
or not. And what we see
is that actually nearly half of all
participants
recognised six, seven, eight, or all nine
dark patterns. That's reasonably high
as a result. So this means that people
are generally able to recognise dark
patterns.
However there are great variations
depending on the dark pattern type.
So certain dark patterns seem to be more
difficult to spot than others.
Yes indeed. For example, we had this dark
pattern
from an online dating app where people
wish to delete their account. It has a
very ambiguous
wording and only 16 of the participants
recognised this dark pattern.
In this hotel booking page there are a
lot of urgency scarcity messages
and 84% of people could recognise them.
We also looked on whether
there were individual differences
for example in terms of age and
education that would influence the
ability of our participants to recognise
dark patterns.
We did find two effects. We can see that
people younger than 40 recognised more
dark patterns
and we also saw that people with a
rather low educational degrees
recognised less dark patterns. So there
are
differences. And for what concerns
research question number three,
where we asked notwithstanding the fact
that people are aware of the existence
of dark patterns
and also able to recognise them, are they
nevertheless
susceptible to be influenced by them?
Interestingly
we didn't find many predictors for
people's likelihood to be influenced. The
only thing we could see
from the regression plot is actually
a tendency of people who detect less
dark patterns to also assume that they
would be more influenced by those.
So what we found is that people are
quite able to recognise dark patterns
and they're also quite aware of the
influence of manipulative designs
on their on their behaviour. However, we
found that awareness
is not a significant factor in
predicting
people's ability to resist that
influence.
We also saw that certain dark patterns
are much easier to recognise than others
and we also saw that people find certain
dark patterns easy to recognise but very
hard to resist.
On top of this, there are dark patterns
such as "autoplay"
that the participants deemed very
influential.
And at the same time, they said that was
a tolerable strategy because it benefits
their user experience.
So we use the term "dark patterns" for
design strategies that are intrinsically
very different.
And as a consequence this means, if we
want to counteract dark patterns we also
need
variegated interventions. This is why we
design a matrix of interventions that
we're going to show you in a while.
So we imagine the matrix of different
interventions that can aim
at different scopes. For example:
certain interventions can raise
awareness towards
the risks of dark patterns.
Certain others
can help people detect dark patterns. And
then
other interventions can help people
resist them. But we can also think of
interventions that can eliminate dark
patterns from online web altogether.
And then these measures can be very
different.
We can have measures that affect the
user directly
such as educational measures
we can also have measures that influence
the use environment such as
a regulatory measures and in between
we can find design interventions
as well as technical interventions.
So what kind of interventions actually
go in the different spaces?
For instance, if we wanted to act on the
awareness of people
through design, then maybe an idea would
be to use
warnings. But warnings
quickly tire people and they stop
recognising them.
So we certainly also need educational
measures
that raise people's ability to detect
dark patterns.
For example, the one that we did in the
survey: the
"spot the dark pattern game". And together
with educational interventions we can
also have
other kinds of design interventions.
For instance,
friction designs. Friction designs can
introduce small obstacles
to the user interaction so that the user
takes on more reflective actions. For
example more reflective
data sharing. And this would go
here. We also believe that we need
ethical design guidelines
such as recommendations that help
designers
adopt bright patterns so that we can
eliminate
dark patterns from the web altogether.
But we also have technical interventions.
For instance,
plugins that help the users to fill in
automatically
very complex content requests. And these
would go
here. These interventions alone won't be
enough.
Dark patterns are omnipresent.
This is why we really need to set hefty
fines
for those industries that are using
illegal dark patterns
in order to set a standard. There's still
space
for more interventions and here we need
your help!
Because we as designers should all be on
the front line
to tame the monster that we helped
create. So
thank you for watching our video. If you
have any question
feel free to reach out and also if
you're working on similar topics we
would be very happy to liaise.
[Music]
Addi!