Dark patterns are a type of user experience technique and persuasive design where, with the help of knowledge about human behavior, a design has been created that enables users or customers to make disadvantageous decisions that you would not otherwise have made. One of the areas in which dark patterns have come to be used is ecommerce websites. This study aims to find out what type of dark patterns are used on Swedish shopping websites, how often they occur, and to gain an understanding of how people who work in the industry view the phenomenon. To do this, a taxonomy based on previous work in dark patterns has been developed. This taxonomy was used to manually analyze 96 of the largest Swedish e-commerce websites. The results showed that Hidden Costs, Low Stock Messages, Misdirections and Activity Messages were the most frequently occurring dark patterns on these websites. The interviews also showed that people working in the ecommerce industry are aware that dark patterns are used. However, they do not see it as a big problem that e-commerce websites try to influence the customer to make certain decisions as long as they do not directly use false information. With this report, we contribute insights into how, and to what extent, dark patterns are used in Swedish shopping websites and therefore also raise the awareness of coercive design and its effects. / Dark patterns är en typ av användarupplevelse och konverterande design där man med hjälp av psykologi och kunskap inom mänskligt beteende skapat en design som möjliggör att du tar ogynnsamma beslut som du annars inte hade tagit. Ett av de områden som dark patterns har kommit att användas på är e-handelshemsidor. Denna studie syftar till att ta reda på vilken typ av dark patterns som används på svenska shoppinghemsidor, hur ofta de förekommer, samt få en förståelse för hur människor som jobbar inom branschen ser på fenomenet. För att göra detta har en taxonomi baserat på tidigare arbeten inom dark patterns tagits fram. Denna taxonomi har sedan fått utgöra grunden för den manuella undersökning av de 96 största svenska e-handelshemsidorna som gjorts. Resultatet visade på att Hidden Costs, Low Stock Messages, Misdirections, och Activity Messages var de allra mest frekvent förekommande dark patterns på dessa hemsidor. Intervjuerna visade även på att folk inom branschen är medvetna om att dark patterns används och ser det inte som något stort problem att man på e-handelshemsidor försöker påverka kunden till att ta särskilda beslut, så länge man inte direkt använder sig av falska uppgifter. Med denna rapport bidrar vi med insikter hur dark patterns används inom Sverige på e-handelshemsidor och därmed också för att öka medvetenheten om tvingande design och effekterna av den.

Kenneth Burke has been described as arguably the most important rhetorician and critical theorist of the twentieth century, and yet an important part of his scholarship has been generally overlooked by the academic community. The pentad has become the most prominent "Burkean" framework for analyzing texts, yet Kenneth Burke himself preferred "a more direct" way of approaching texts which he named "indexing." This thesis recreates this method from the pieces found in his scholarly writing, personal correspondence, and the papers his students produced for the class he taught at Bennington College. Kenneth Burke believed indexing could uncover the "pattern of experience" or "motivational structures" a text embodies, and thereby help people become aware of the persuasive power different texts have. The method of indexing has two parts: 1. Finding the implicit equations in a text, and 2. Tracking the hierarchies of terms and God-terms in those equations. Identifying equations in a text starts with finding "key terms" in a text, meaning terms which carry special significance as indicated by their intensity and frequency of usage. One then tracks the context of these terms throughout a text to find which other words frequently occur together with these words. The second step, tracking hierarchies of terms, is done by finding how the terms in the equations relate to each other in a hierarchy. We start with specific and move upward to more general terms. On the top of the pyramid we find the God-term, which is the driving motivation and ground of all possibility in the text. Kenneth Burke hoped his method of indexing could help us understand the power language and motivational structures have to drive human action, and that we could question our own motivational structure as well as that of others and of the communities we operate in.