How Well Do Experts Understand End-Users’ Perceptions of Manipulative Patterns?

Abstract

How well do experts understand end-users’ perceptions of manipulative patterns? We conducted online surveys with end-users and with experts assessing perceptions of manipulative patterns. Participants saw images of interfaces and evaluated each through a series of semantic scales (e.g., deceitful to honest). After being shown a definition of manipulative patterns, they then decided whether each interface exemplified a manipulative pattern. End-users correctly identified images as manipulative approximately half of the time, and though experts were more often correct, the differences were not statistically significant. However, end-users’ descriptions of the images were significantly more positive than experts assumed, resulting in experts over-estimating end-users’ ability to recognize when they were being manipulated by an interface.