Colin Gray

Who they are

The 2018 paper lists the authors at Purdue University.

The 2018 paper is a study of practice.

Key papers

Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). The dark (patterns) side of UX design. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paper 534. doi:10.1145/3173574.3174108. Read at abstract level and through the authors' own description of the corpus and strategies.

Key ideas

The five strategies are definitions of what a design does. Nagging is a minor redirection of expected functionality that persists over one or more interactions, often as repeated interruption. Obstruction impedes a task flow and makes an interaction harder than it needs to be, in order to dissuade an action. Sneaking hides, disguises or delays information that is relevant to the user, usually so that they take an action they might object to if they knew about it. Interface interference is any manipulation of the interface that favours certain actions over others, with hidden information, preselection and aesthetic manipulation as subtypes. Forced action requires users to perform a specific action in order to access or keep accessing a function.

The abstract also reports that the ethical issues practitioners raised were wide and frequently conflated under the umbrella term, and that the examples underscored a shared concern that UX designers could become complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. Later work by Mathur and colleagues proposes a definition by asking which attributes a design has rather than which strategy it uses.

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