Disentangling Vulnerability to Manipulative Designs: An Experiential Perspective to Rethink Resistance Strategies

Manipulative designs or so-called “dark patterns” are design features, patterns and mechanisms that “subvert, impair, or distort the ability of a user to make autonomous and informed choices in relation to digital systems regardless of the designer’s intent'' (Gray et al., 2024). By steering users to make decisions they would not make if fully informed, manipulative designs put users' autonomy at stake, which is associated with a wide range of harms. Some people suffer the consequences of manipulative designs more than others: they are more vulnerable to the harms of these designs. Vulnerability is a position of power imbalance in which users are more susceptible to receiving an impact and less likely to recover from it. Vulnerability is layered, situated, and interpersonal: while everyone can be vulnerable, some can be more vulnerable than others, and the “drivers of vulnerability” are multifaceted elements that place users in such positions of higher risk. With this in mind, I investigated how HCI and design scholarship can contribute to rethinking countermeasures to protect users by understanding the experiences that make users vulnerable to manipulative designs. Therefore, the overall objective of this dissertation is to understand what vulnerability means in the realm of manipulative designs and to help the design community integrate this knowledge into theory and practice. This dissertation first examines practitioners' perspectives and explores how the tensions between persuasive design and manipulation in UX design practice inform vulnerability to manipulative designs. It explains how manipulation can be engineered in interaction design and what tensions practitioners face in their design processes by investigating experienced UX/UI designers with co-creation workshops. This study also provides design guidelines to support practitioners. Following that study, this dissertation examines how HCI can contribute to conceptualising vulnerability in manipulative designs through a multidisciplinary conversation. By understanding the flaws of legal texts in conceptualising vulnerability, we present the different ways in which users may become vulnerable, with a special focus on their ecologies, and provide some tools for legal scholars and policymakers to learn from HCI and design expertise. Building on the idea that context can make users vulnerable, this dissertation explores the contextual aspects that drive vulnerability to manipulative interfaces. To do so, I then report on three main studies relying on qualitative and design research-inspired methods with three traditionally considered vulnerable groups —teenagers, young adults at social exclusion risk, and older adults. First, by studying teenagers’ experiences in three contexts – video games, social media and e-commerce –, this thesis explains the social aspect of manipulative designs and provides contextual harms tied to this population. With this study, I highlight the importance of social relationships as mediators of experiences with manipulative designs. Second, with “magic machines workshops” to understand the experiences of manipulation in older adults, the thesis showcases their needs regarding resisting manipulation. How older adults understand manipulation helped us identify design challenges for counter-interventions. Third, by understanding young adults with lower levels of digital skills and their experiences with manipulative designs, this thesis explains how the imaginaries of manipulative designs are related to the different ways to resist them. Lastly, through a scoping review of existing intervention spaces and the development of an experience map, I discuss potential intervention spaces and design challenges for the community that aim to target situations of vulnerability. Overall, this thesis contributes to the empirical investigation of vulnerability to manipulative designs, reflecting on the experiential vulnerability drivers. Social drivers, interaction drivers, and drivers related to users’ agency mediate their interactions and make them vulnerable. By studying what vulnerability means in the context of manipulative designs, I also identified challenges and opportunity spaces to design counter-interventions for manipulative designs and to prevent users from experiencing situations of vulnerability. This has allowed me to suggest a future direction for the community that reframes the problem of online manipulation as one of vulnerability. To help scholars in this, I provide a template to start with new problems, nuances and approaches for studying and preventing manipulative designs.