Ask your students to write a paper about Dark Patterns

Here are some indications and tips you can provide to your students:

• The paper should be made up of two main parts, a literature review section, and experiment section, plus conclusions and references.
• The Literature Review Section
  • This section must explore at least three papers on the topic of Dark Patterns, one of which must be the seminal paper Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., and Toombs, A. L. (2018) The dark (patterns) side of UX design. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-14).
  • For each paper, provide a 300-400 word summary, including an introduction and a description of the experiment in the paper, and mention some of the key conclusions of the paper. Select one diagram from the paper to include and comment in your review.
• The Experiment Section
  • This section will document your own exploration of a site that uses one or more Dark Patterns. It should include screenshots and a description of the context and implementation of the Dark Patterns.
• Conclusions Section
  Conclusions are expected to be 300-500 words.
• References
  All references should be in Harvard format.

Ask your students to write an essay about Dark Patterns

Here are some indications and tips you can provide to your students:

• Write an essay on the ethics of Dark Patterns. This will involve a bit of reading and research on your behalf, looking at research papers, and other content online like newspaper articles on UX, and websites concerning ethics and Dark Patterns.
• An essay usually has three parts:
  • • Introduction. An overview of the essay highlighting the key arguments
    • Main Body. Addressing the key issues and arguments, review your key readings, and critique them, and present your arguments, and critique yourself.
      The typical structure of an argument is:
      • Claim. Outline the main claim you are making, sometimes called the overall thesis.
      • Grounds. Describe the evidence and facts that support your claim, best evidence first.
      • Bridge. Explain and underscore how the grounds supports your claim.
      • Backing. Add any additional logic or reasoning that support the bridge.
      • Counterclaim. Discuss the alternative perspectives that oppose your thesis.
      • Rebuttal. Identify the weaknesses in the counterclaim and present evidence that refutes it.
    • Conclusions. 
• As part of the process of writing this essay you might have to draft and redraft it several times. This process will help you in developing a formal, academic “voice”.

Ask your students to create an infographic or poster based on Dark Patterns

Ask your student to organize and document an interview with someone who has been a victim of Dark Patterns

Here are some indications and tips you can provide to your students:

• How to find the interviewee? Take a look around. A victim of Dark Patterms is basically anyone who has ever purchased anything online.
• Prior to the interview, help the person to understand  what a Dark Pattern is by writing a 500-700 description of Dark Patterns, including some key examples. 
• Consider asking the following questions (feel free to put the suggested questions in your own words and to add others:
  • • Describe what you were doing when you encountered the Dark Pattern/s
    • When did you discover you had been tricked?
    • How did it make you feel?
    • Were you able to do anything about it?
    • Did it make you change your online behavior afterwards?
    • Do you think there should be laws stopping companies doing this?
• Document your interview in a brief report including the summary you provided to the interviewee, the questions you asked and their answers, and a 500-700 words reflection piece on the interview answers.
• The document will be marked as follows:
  • • Dark Patterns summary – 20%
    • Interview questions – number of questions * (60/number of questions)
    • Reflections – 20%

Ask your students to write about 2 Bright Patterns

Ask your students to build a browser extension / plug-in for the detection of Dark Patterns

Here are some indications and tips you can provide to your students:

• Selecting the browser of your choice, build an extension / plug-in that will detect at least two Dark Patterns, and highlight them in some way.
• The patterns can be highlighted with a different colour, with the overlay of big red arrows pointing to the area of concern, or with a pop-up explaining the nature and risks of the pattern.
• Submit:
  • • For each Dark Pattern reviewed in class, explain in one sentence why you think it either would be easy or difficult to detect it in an automated way.
    • Pick 2 or more patterns and outline in 100-200 words how you would automatically detect these patterns in code.
    • The code you developed.
    • 5 screenshots of the tool in action
    • A 300-400 words reflection piece