🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA | F23.11
Dark UX Patterns: Your CMU Course Experience, Dark UX in Airlines: a Case Study, Exploring Dark Patterns, Dark UX Cheat Sheet
👋 Announcements — Have a good break! 🦃
Happy Thanksgiving Break Eve! 🥧 We hope everyone has a great time with friends and/or family and takes a much needed break! Before you check out, please join us in welcoming two new faces/emojis to our team! 🎉
🚐 Sherry Chen is a senior studying HCI and IS!
🐘 Evelyn Lui is a freshman studying IS!
🤖 Join the Futurist club for our Spring '24 client project!
Check out this cool opportunity with the Futurist club! The Futurist club speculates on a positive design future, practicing highly desirable future-thinking skills in the UX industry without being limited to the right now. 🏃 This project investigates the future of play within learning spaces, with a focus on young adults.
🌟 Grounding ourselves in the core values of LEGO as Serious Play methodology, we will speculate on different futures and open up the possibilities where play can be integrated into learning spaces.
⚡ No prior experience is needed; the club is open to grad and undergrad students of all grades and majors! It will be counted as a 9 unit independent study.
💭 Working both independently and as a team, we'll be going through phases of research, design sprints, and a collaborative final project.
⭐ Read more about the project in the application form (due by Fri, 24 Nov).
⭐ Successful applicants will be announced shortly after. Feel free to reach out to apantja@andrew.cmu.edu if you have any other questions.
🍎 Campus Compass — Your CMU Course Experience!
Written & edited by: 🥸 Kaitlyn Ng
While UX usually refers to digital experiences, UX can also be applied to many everyday experiences — like education 🍎. And with the semester coming to a close (finally!), we’re providing you with the opportunity to improve the user experience of the CMU classes you’ve taken this semester or in previous semesters. Click the button down below to let us know your experiences with your CMU courses! 👇
🌀 Opinion — Dark UX in Airlines: a Case Study
Written & edited by: 🚐 Sherry Chen
Whether its gaming, food, or travel, designers in almost every industry are nudging us to spend money. 💸 Many design patterns, from the colors, shapes, and sizes of buttons, lead us to spend more than we would have anticipated. 😢
Ever wonder how designers specifically nudge users to perform unwanted actions? 🤔Check out our case study on United Airline’s flight booking service! 🛫
🍀 Editor’s Pick — Exploring Dark Patterns
Written & edited by: 🐘 Evelyn Lui and 🧸 Ahana Banerjee
As businesses push for higher conversion rates and website user engagement, more and more companies are willing to resort to questionable design choices in order to achieve this goal. For consumers and UX/UI designers alike, this should be a pressing concern involving the future of online experiences.
First… what are dark patterns? 🤔
📖 “Dark patterns refer to user interface design choices that are intentionally crafted to deceive or manipulate users into taking actions they might **not have intended.”
— David Martin
When was the last time you’ve seen a “Limited Time Offer” on a website or was unknowingly added to a subscription letter of a brand? Dark patterns can be seen all around us, and we just need to take the time to notice it! 🫣
Impact of Dark Patterns 💥
Frustration and Distrust: Dark patterns are negative experiences that can lead to a breach in trust among users. This can have serious consequences in the long run as reputation can make or break a business!
Ethical Concerns: Undermining user satisfaction and usability contradicts the fundamental principles of UX design. As designers, we need to advocate for ethical and transparent design practices.
Key Strategies 🤝
In order to build a meaningful and long lasting relationship with our users, we must champion genuine interactions that foster a healthy UX ecosystem! Here are some recommendations:
🔍 Transparent Objectives: By aligning the objectives of the website/application with the user’s goal, companies can establish trust between the brand and customers.
📝 User Feedback and Testing: User feedback data can be valuable in identifying potential usability issues. Incorporate them into the design process to create a more candid experience!
🎓 Education and Awareness: Informing stakeholders and clients about dark patterns and how to avoid them can lead to stronger efforts to create more ethical and user-friendly designs.
❓ What are some other ways that you can think of to discourage the implementation of dark patterns around us?
🎯 Resource — Dark UX Cheat Sheet
Written & edited by: 😈 Sophie McGrady
🔦 “Dark patterns are interface design tricks that navigate people's decision-making by steering, coercing, or deceiving them into actions they would not necessarily engage in if they knew the consequences.”
Check out this Dark UX cheat sheet created by Thomas Mildner that identifies dark UX patterns from 2010 to today! Each colored tile is a different dark UX pattern. Click on a tile to learn more about a given pattern.
🧐 Some questions to ask yourself:
👀 Have you seen any of these patterns in real life?
🧠 Did you learn about a new pattern?
🔍 Are there any patterns you think the cheat sheet missed?
Use this resource to be both more aware of the UX you encounter in your daily life as well as more aware of how you are creating designs!
🙈 Fun - How Airbnb does design?
🎧 A short and sweet podcast with Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, about his design strategy and how it’s implemented in Airbnb. 🏨 Hosted by Lenny Rachitsky, a general cool guy that interviews industry leaders to share insights into how they do things!
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
Our awesome team includes: 🥸 Kaitlyn Ng, 😈 Sophie McGrady, 🧸 Ahana Banerjee, 🕺 Arin Pantja, 🐘 Evelyn Lui, 🚐 Sherry Chen, 🐳 Alana Wu, and 🦝 Caleb Sun.
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