Online vendors often deploy limited-time and limited-quantity cues on their e-commerce sites to influence consumers purchase decisions. Although these scarcity cues can reflect genuine restrictions in the availability of goods, they are increasingly considered as ill-intentioned nudges or ‘dark patterns’ due to their omnipresence and success in persuading consumers. In an online experiment (N = 202), we examined the effects of limited-time and limited-quantity cues on perceived task load, perceived benevolence, and user experience. Results suggest that participants associated scarcity cues with a lack of benevolence from online vendors. E-commerce site design without scarcity cues provided participants with a superior hedonic and pragmatic user experience. In the case of limited-time scarcity cues, participants reported frustration-related negative emotions. We discuss the implications of these findings from the perspectives of dark pattern researchers, designers, and online vendors.

HCI researchers are increasingly concerned about the prevalence of manipulative design strategies in user interfaces, commonly referred to as “dark patterns”. The line between manipulation and persuasion strategies is often blurred, leading to legal and ethical concerns. This paper examines the tension between persuasive UX practices and manipulative designs. UX/UI design professionals (n=22), split into eight focus groups, conducted design activities on two fictitious scenarios. We qualitatively analysed their discussions regarding strategies for influencing user behaviours and their underlying reasoning. Our findings reveal a combination of classical UI design strategies like sticky interfaces and incentives as their most common practice to influence user behaviour. We also unveil that trust, transparency, and user autonomy act as guiding principles for the professionals in assessing their ideas. However, a thorough approach is missing; despite a general user-first attitude, they feel constrained by contextual factors. We explain how the tensions between principles and context contribute to manipulative designs online.

Persuasive tactics intend to encourage users to open advertising emails. However, these tactics can overwhelm users, which makes them frustrated and leads to lower open rates. This paper intends to understand which persuasive tactics are used and how they are perceived by users. We first developed a categorization of inbox-level persuasive tactics in permission-based advertising emails. We then asked participants to interact with an email inbox prototype, combined with interviews (N=32), to investigate their opinions towards advertising emails and underlying persuasive tactics. Our qualitative findings reveal poor user experience with advertising emails, which was related to feeling surveilled by companies, forced subscription, high prior knowledge about persuasive tactics, and a desire for more agency. We also found that using certain persuasive tactics on the inbox level is perceived as ethically inappropriate. Based on these insights, we provide design recommendations to improve advertising communication and make such emails more valuable to users.

Research in human–computer interaction (HCI) has identified meaning as an important, yet poorly understood concept in interaction design contexts. Central to this development is the increasing emphasis on designing products and technologies that promote leisure, personal fulfillment, and well-being. As spaces of profound historical significance and societal value, museums offer a unique perspective on how people construct meaning during their interactions in museum spaces and with collections, which may help to deepen notions of the content of meaningful interaction and support innovative design for cultural heritage contexts. The present work reports on the results of two studies that investigate meaning-making in museums. The first is an experience narrative study (N = 32) that analyzed 175 memorable museum visits, resulting in the establishment of 23 triggers that inform meaningful interaction in museums. A second study (N = 354) validated the comprehensiveness and generalisability of the triggers by asking participants to apply them to their own memorable museum experiences. We conclude with a framework of meaning in museums featuring the 23 triggers and two descriptive categories of temporality and scope. Our findings contribute to meaning research in HCI for museums through an articulation of the content of meaning-making in the cultural sector.

When flying robots are used in close-range interaction with humans, the noise they generate, also called consequential sound, is a critical parameter for user acceptance. We conjecture that there is a benefit in adding natural sounds to noisy domestic drones. To test our hypothesis experimentally, we carried out a mixed-methods research study (N = 56) on reported user perception of a sonified domestic flying robot with three sound conditions at three distances. The natural sounds studied were, respectively, added to the robot’s inherent noises during flying; namely, a bird song and a rain sound, plus a control condition of no added sound. The distances studied were set according to proxemics; namely, near , middle , and far . Our results show that adding bird song or rain sound affects the participants’ perceptions, and the proxemic distances play a nonnegligible role. For instance, we found that participants liked the bird condition the most when the drone was at far , while they disliked the same sound the most when at near . We also found that participants’ perceptions strongly depended on their associations and interpretations deriving from previous experience. We derived six concrete design recommendations.

Online services pervasively employ manipulative designs (i.e., dark patterns) to influence users to purchase goods and subscriptions, spend more time on-site, or mindlessly accept the harvesting of their personal data. To protect users from the lure of such designs, we asked: are users aware of the presence of dark patterns? If so, are they able to resist them? By surveying 406 individuals, we found that they are generally aware of the influence that manipulative designs can exert on their online behaviour. However, being aware does not equip users with the ability to oppose such influence. We further find that respondents, especially younger ones, often recognise the ”darkness” of certain designs, but remain unsure of the actual harm they may suffer. Finally, we discuss a set of interventions (e.g., bright patterns, design frictions, training games, applications to expedite legal enforcement) in the light of our findings.

The ever-increasing scale and complexity of cyber attacks and cyber-criminal activities necessitate secure and effective sharing of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) among a diverse set of stakeholders and communities. CTI sharing platforms are becoming indispensable tools for cooperative and collaborative cybersecurity. Nevertheless, despite the growing research in this area, the emphasis is often placed on the technical aspects, incentives, or implications associated with CTI sharing, as opposed to investigating challenges encountered by users of such platforms. To date, user experience (UX) aspects remain largely unexplored.

Usable privacy and security researchers have developed a variety of approaches to represent risk to research participants. To understand how these approaches are used and when each might be most appropriate, we conducted a systematic literature review of methods used in security and privacy studies with human participants. From a sample of 633 papers published at five top conferences between 2014 and 2018 that included keywords related to both security/privacy and usability, we systematically selected and analyzed 284 full-length papers that included human subjects studies. Our analysis focused on study methods; risk representation; the use of prototypes, scenarios, and educational intervention; the use of deception to simulate risk; and types of participants. We discuss benefits and shortcomings of the methods, and identify key methodological, ethical, and research challenges when representing and assessing security and privacy risk. We also provide guidelines for the reporting of user studies in security and privacy.

A growing body of research in the usable privacy and security community addresses the question of how to best influence user behavior to reduce risk-taking. We propose to address this challenge by integrating the concept of user experience (UX) into empirical usable privacy and security studies that attempt to change risk-taking behavior. UX enables us to study the complex interplay between user-related, system-related and contextual factors and provides insights into the experiential aspects underlying behavior change, including negative experiences.

An unsolved debate in the field of usable security concerns whether security mechanisms should be visible, or black-boxed away from the user for the sake of usability. However, tying this question to pragmatic usability factors only might be simplistic. This study aims at researching the impact of displaying security mechanisms on User Experience (UX) in the context of e-voting. Two versions of an e-voting application were designed and tested using a between-group experimental protocol (N=38). Version D displayed security mechanisms, while version ND did not reveal any security-related information. We collected data on UX using stan-dardised evaluation scales and semi-structured interviews. Version D performed better overall in terms of UX and need fulfilment. Qualitative analysis of the interviews gives further insights into factors impacting perceived security. Our study adds to existing research suggesting a conceptual shift from usability to UX and discusses implications for designing and evaluating secure systems.

The Driver Diaries are a mobility behaviour logging methodology, consisting of an online survey, a mobile application and focus group interviews. They are used to collect data about mobility behaviour, routines and motivations of commuters in Luxembourg. The paper focuses on design and development of the Driver Diaries and it explores the use of the application as a requirements capture and an integral element of an infotainment application that can change the standard routine driving behaviour of mobility participants in order to reduce traffic congestion.

In this paper we present the DriveLab IVIS testing platform which allows for the same experiments to be conducted both under simulator and real car conditions. Other key aspects of DriveLab is that it is highly modular (therefore allowing the exchange or integration of different components) and that it supports more than one driver. For example we show that the same IVIS devices and scenario can be used with two different 3D engines. The paper provides a technical overview and a brief example of use.