Deceptive design, also commonly known as “dark patterns“ obscure or impair consumer autonomy or choice and trick users into taking actions that they may not otherwise take. These design choices undermine privacy, consumer protection, and trust in online products and services. While academic literature focuses on sorting, creating taxonomies and finding evidence of deceptive design on the internet, practitioners such as designers within technology-building ecosystems remain unaware of the harms caused by their daily practice. Little material exists which translates existing research into insights for practitioners while intervening to create awareness, and provide more responsible, ethical and trusted design practices. This presentation will share learnings from a year-long project to create a manual of responsible design for practitioners keeping users and their needs at the centre: https://www.design.pranavainstitute.com/manualforpractitioners
Using a human-centered design approach, this project combines multidisciplinary research with insights gathered from a community of practitioners and key stakeholders to create a manual of ethical UI/UX design principles which practitioners can use to tackle deceptive design practices.
The project has been supported by the University of Notre-Dame and IBM’s Tech Ethics Lab in the US. The project website can be accessed here: https://www.design.pranavainstitute.com/