”I feel manipulated and forced” : A qualitative study of ethical perspectives and dark patterns

Persuasive design and dark patterns are types of design that aims to change the attitudes and behaviors of users. This study addresses where and how persuasive design and dark patterns are integrated into a selection of two websites, and what users of a website feel about the design underlying purposes. Persuasive design is an area with a design practice where the focus is on influencing the user's behavior through a product or service's characteristics. A dark pattern is an interface designed to trick users into performing actions in applications that they are not meant to perform. The purpose of the study is to map typical UX-related persuasive designs and dark patterns on a selection of websites using Gray’s definition of dark patterns and Ethical principles from Association for Computing Machinery, then analyze five users and their ethical stance. The results of the interviews and observations show that users are not aware that a persuasive design and dark patterns elements exist on a website. The dark patterns influence the users to perform a behavior in a certain direction. The results of the theory based analysis have resulted in Gray’s dark patterns and Ethical principles from Association for Computing Machinery features that on websites allow users to be influenced by a persuasive design and/or dark patterns. In summary, it can be concluded that the participants in the study agree that a design involving dark patterns is considered unethical.