Dark Patterns on Slovenian Web Pages

Abstract

Online merchants strive to convince consumers to buy their products and resort to the use of strategies for manipulating users’ choices. One of the most common strategies is the use of dark patterns, which involve different techniques for manipulating consumers to behave in a specific manner, such as purchasing products. The paper contains an overview of seven categories of 15 different types of dark patterns. We examined 55 Slovenian online shops and analyzed the use of dark patterns on the subject websites. More specifically, our goal was to determine the current state of dark pattern use and compare the results to the use of dark patterns on foreign websites. Our results show that dark patterns occur just as often on Slovenian websites as they do on foreign ones and that most Slovenian online merchants utilize several different dark patterns on their websites to influence consumer behaviour.