hi my name is agneshka and on behalf of
my colleagues johan and eric i will
present our paper about online terms and
conditions and how the user interface
design affects
users
this research is a result of a project
founded by the swedish consumer agency
and was conducted at the service
research center at calstr university in
sweden
i want to start by telling you a story
in 2010 april's full day e-commerce
store game station included the
following text
in their terms
by placing an order via this website on
the first day of the fourth month of the
year 2010 and not only you agreed to
grant us a non-transferable option to
claim from now and forevermore your
immortal soul
of course this was a part of the joke
but the fact is that until today they
only mortal soul a source of
7500 people because most of the users do
not notice the calls in the terms
such blind agreements to terms and
conditions happen for many reasons for
instance the texts are too long there is
nothing we can do but to agree
but sometimes such blind agreements may
result from a poorly designed user
interface
such as in this example where the online
service provider shows trends
as a hyperlinks to another page
using gray colored and significantly
smaller font compared to the rest of the
text
this is the most common but problematic
design as and we decided to examine it
in this research we raised three
questions
how design affects the opening rate of
terms and conditions how design affects
awareness and what is the association
between decision-making styles awareness
and satisfaction
surprisingly there is not that much
research dedicated to design of terms
and conditions
however there are some studies that
tackle this problem
and we decided to partially replicate
one of those studies due to time
constraints i cannot represent the
original study and our research in
detail but i invite those interested to
read the paper for more information
to answer our research questions we
designed an online experiment
we collected data from swedish
population and the total number of
participants was 987
we introduced participants to the
experiment with a short scenario asking
them to imagine that they buy a t-shirt
from a new vendor and that they might be
more careful
about who the vendor is
we also ask them to fantasize that all
information that they provide to the
vendor is theirs
participants were asked to first select
a product
and then proceed to payment
we use the product selection page to
increase ecological validity
here participants needed to select the
shirt size color and the amount after
completing the selection the button till
kassan to check out was enabled
next participants were randomly assigned
to one of four conditions representing
different designs of the checkout page
control icons cost queue and scroll
the checkout page looked almost the same
in all experimental conditions
it only differed in the way terms and
conditions were presented
we used the most commonly used design of
terms and conditions hidden as a
hyperlinked text
as a control condition participants had
to tick the box that they read and agree
to the terms to complete their purchase
let's look for shopit complete the
purchase a button was disabled until the
terms checkbox was checked
the icons condition was almost the same
as the control and the only difference
is that there were four icons
accompanied by short explanatory text
about
some facts from the full text of the
terms for example the return policy
the cost of queue condition was also
like the control condition
the only difference was that it
contained a visual queue nudging
participants to read terms and
conditions
because it's a two column in five
minutes
the scroll condition was different the
full text of the trends was displayed in
a scoreboard a scrollable box
the participants needed to scroll it
before they could check the i read and
agree the terms box
this condition did not provide the
hyperlink to the terms page and because
the full text
was displayed in the scrollable box i
have to mention that the terms and
conditions used in this study were
slightly shorter than the typical terms
however we consulted their content with
the legal department from the swedish
consumer agency to ensure that all legal
immediate information is included
next we measured our outcome variables
directly after clicking the complete
purchase button participants were
presented with a question
how satisfied are you with your buying
experience
to measure satisfaction we use emojis to
imitate the familiar satisfaction
measuring push standalone kayosks
next we measured awareness and we asked
participants eight questions four
questions were about the information
presented in the icons condition so in
the text accompanying icons and the
remaining four questions asked for the
information included in the
full text of the terms
we also calculated the mean of responses
of to all eight questions to assess
awareness of all information so both in
icons and beyond
in the experiment we also assessed the
opening rate of terms and conditions but
that was only possible
in the control icons and costly
conditions
and we wanted to investigate the
relationship between satisfaction
awareness and decision-making style so
we measured the decision-making style
with previously validated scale that
assesses rational and intuitive
decision-making styles
we use statistical analysis on the
collective data and overall our results
were similar to the results from the
original study and here are the main
findings
regarding the opening rate of the terms
and conditions our results show that
cost q has the most significant impact
with a 53 increase compared to the
control condition on the other hand
icons have the opposite effect
presumably people feel like they do not
have to open the full terms because they
are already provided with the critical
information
regarding awareness we found that simple
changes in the design such as icons with
text significantly improve awareness of
this information included in this such
text although in our case this design
had a positive impact on the user in
real life it could be easily misused as
a form of dark pattern
providing users only with information
that will convince them to continue with
the purchase
we also found that scroll design had the
most substantial impact on the overall
awareness of the terms however we must
remember that our terms were
well structured and shortened in the
terms that some online services use
and still the mere exposure to the terms
and forcing users to scroll through the
text might affect the attention
to terms and conditions texts
lastly but not least we should not
disregard the effects of the cost queue
considering the awareness of the
information from the full text of terms
the cost queue had been the most
successful
although scroll condition performed
almost the same as such a simple match
might encourage people to actually
engage with the terms and spend more
time on reading or scrolling through
and through the moderation model we
found that participants with higher
scores in rationality and awareness were
more satisfied however when the level of
awareness was low satisfaction scores
decreased even among participants with
high scores and irrationality
this suggests the possibility to
increase satisfaction levels when
applying designs that improve awareness
at least among more rationally decisive
users
i have to note that our findings
predominantly have small effect sizes
however considering that many people
interact with terms and conditions daily
we believe they are still meaningful
and with that i would like to conclude
my talk i encourage you to read our
paper and i'm looking forward to your
questions and feedback thank you