UI Dark Patterns and Where to Find Them: A Study on Mobile Applications and User Perception

By Linda Di Geronimo, Larissa Braz, Enrico Fregnan, Fabio Palomba, Alberto Bacchelli. International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2020

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A Dark Pattern (DP) is an interface maliciously crafted to deceive users into performing actions they did not mean to do. In this work, we analyze Dark Patterns in 240 popular mobile apps and conduct an online experiment with 589 users on how they perceive Dark Patterns in such apps. The results of the analysis show that 95% of the analyzed apps contain one or more forms of Dark Patterns and, on average, popular applications include at least seven different types of deceiving interfaces. The online experiment shows that most users do not recognize Dark Patterns, but can perform better in recognizing malicious designs if informed on the issue. We discuss the impact of our work and what measures could be applied to alleviate the issue.

Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science, Signal Processing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df80a81dff925047165af58a0c4357f4f4640341

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In Information Systems

1. Arjun Narayan
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1. Jonathan R. Mayer
2. Arjun Narayan
3. Mary Anne Smart

Citations in the corpus

• What Makes a Dark Pattern... Dark?: Design Attributes, Normative Considerations, and Measurement Methods (2021, background): “[12] found that more than 95% of the 200 most popular apps contain at least one dark pattern from the Gray et al [21] taxonomy.”
• Nine Potential Pitfalls when Designing Human-AI Co-Creative Systems (2021, background): “Other work collected dark UI/UX patterns empirically by reviewing a large set of existing mobile applications [17].”