Deceptive Patterns
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Rules Of Engagement: Levelling Up To Combat Unethical CUI Design

Author
Thomas Mildner, Philip R. Doyle, Gian-Luca Savino, R. Malaka
Date
19 Jul 2022
Publisher
International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces
Focus
AI & Automation
Category
Academic Scholar

A simplified methodology to assess interfaces based on five dimensions taken from prior research on so-called dark patterns, which is hoped to provide a viable way for quantifying instances of unethical interface design that will prove useful to researchers, regulators and potentially even users.

While a central goal of HCI has always been to create and develop interfaces that are easy to use, a deeper focus has been set more recently on designing interfaces more ethically. However, the exact meaning and measurement of ethical design has yet to be established both within the CUI community and among HCI researchers more broadly. In this provocation paper we propose a simplified methodology to assess interfaces based on five dimensions taken from prior research on so-called dark patterns. As a result, our approach offers a numeric score to its users representing the manipulative nature of evaluated interfaces.