The purpose of this study is to explore the ethical dilemma in design that User Experience (UX) designers encounter in their workplace, consumers’ perception of ethics in bright patterns and dark patterns, and consumers’ decisions between bright patterns and dark patterns. The former aims to understand the reason behind the prevalence of dark patterns, while the latter aims to determine whether bright patterns are a potential ethical approach that designers can adopt in the future. In this study, the methods semi-structured interview and within-subjects experiment with follow-up interview were conducted to gather empirical data. For both methods, a content analysis was selected to analyze the empirical data, which resulted in findings that answered the research questions of this study. The findings show that (1) authority to decide how designers should address ethics in design is more distributed to those investing in a product development project, (2) most ethical issues revolve around challenges of working in an ethical manner rather than bad practices of incorporating ethics in design work, (3) designers adopt one or more ethical approaches to stay ethical and /or address ethical issues that arise in their workplace, (4) some specific bright patterns and dark patterns have no influence on consumer decisions while other specific bright patterns and dark patterns influence consumer decisions, and (5) consumers perceive bright patterns to be more ethical than dark patterns in terms of freedom of choice and transparency.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-57852 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Truong, Hellen, Dalbard, Axel |
| Publisher | Jönköping University, JTH, Avdelningen för datateknik och informatik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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