“If They Have No Choice, They’ll Accept!”: How Children and Adolescents Assess Deceptive Designs

Deceptive (or dark) patterns are UI design strategies that manipulate users into decisions against their best interests. Unlike with adults, their effects on children and adolescents, who are especially vulnerable groups and experience such designs from a young age, have received little attention. Therefore, we explored how these two age groups assess deceptive patterns. In our study, 45 children (10–12 years) and 37 adolescents (16–18 years) redrew fair designs to make them deceptive and ranked deceptive interfaces by how effectively they might influence users. Both age groups used most of the high-level deceptive patterns from an existing ontology, but also less common manipulative strategies. While children opted for more extreme designs, including threats and rewards, adolescents chose subtler manipulations closer to tactics employed in reality, like False Hierarchy. We contribute these and other insights into how these groups perceive deceptive patterns, and how those findings map to existing pattern literature.