The dark (patterns) side of UX design
Colin Gray and colleagues collect examples that practitioners and others had identified as dark patterns, drawing on social media, practitioner blogs and news outlets as well as their own use of products, and analyse what the designs do. They propose five strategies for classifying them: nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference and forced action. The paper also reports that the ethical concerns practitioners raised were wide and were often run together under the single term, and that the examples pointed to a shared worry that designers could become complicit in manipulative practices.
Colin Gray and colleagues collect examples that practitioners and others had identified as dark patterns, drawing on social media, practitioner blogs and news outlets as well as their own use of products, and analyse what the designs do. They propose five strategies for classifying them: nagging, obstruction, sneaking, interface interference and forced action. The paper also reports that the ethical concerns practitioners raised were wide and were often run together under the single term, and that the examples pointed to a shared worry that designers could become complicit in manipulative practices.
Written from the abstract as published with the paper, read 2026-10-28.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paper 534. doi:10.1145/3173574.3174108 https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108