What makes a dark pattern... dark? Design attributes, normative considerations, and measurement methods
Arunesh Mathur, Mihir Kshirsagar and Jonathan Mayer begin from the observation that research on dark patterns, interface designs that scholars consider problematic and that are common in shopping and privacy settings, has so far been mostly descriptive: it documents and categorises objectionable interfaces. They say the literature lacks a conceptual foundation and leaves open what makes an interface a dark pattern and why certain designs are problematic for users or for society.
Arunesh Mathur, Mihir Kshirsagar and Jonathan Mayer begin from the observation that research on dark patterns, interface designs that scholars consider problematic and that are common in shopping and privacy settings, has so far been mostly descriptive: it documents and categorises objectionable interfaces. They say the literature lacks a conceptual foundation and leaves open what makes an interface a dark pattern and why certain designs are problematic for users or for society.
Written from the opening of the abstract as shown on the OpenAlex record, read 2026-10-28.
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Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3411764.3445610 https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445610