Exploring Deceptive Design Patterns in Voice Interfaces

Deceptive design patterns (sometimes called “dark patterns”) are user interface design elements that may trick, deceive, or mislead users into behaviors that often benefit the party implementing the design over the end user. Prior work has taxonomized, investigated, and measured the prevalence of such patterns primarily in visual user interfaces (e.g., on websites). However, as the ubiquity of voice assistants and other voice-assisted technologies increases, we must anticipate how deceptive designs will be (and indeed, are already) deployed in voice interactions. This paper makes two contributions towards characterizing and surfacing deceptive design patterns in voice interfaces. First, we make a conceptual contribution, identifying key characteristics of voice interfaces that may enable deceptive design patterns, and surfacing existing and theoretical examples of such patterns. Second, we present the findings from a scenario-based user survey with 93 participants, in which we investigate participants’ perceptions of voice interfaces that we consider to be both deceptive and non-deceptive.