Over recent years, digital platforms and services have become ever more competitive. As competition has intensified, companies have found new ways to maximize profit. Deceptive patterns are design tactics in user interfaces that manipulate and deceive users, compromising user agency and privacy. Although research has focused on deceptive pattern taxonomies and end-user experiences, a gap still exists in understanding designers' perspectives on deceptive patterns. This study examined user experience and web designers' (N = 34) conceptualizations, familiarity, and reasons to implement, or not to implement, deceptive patterns. The results indicate that designers had a strong ethical commitment to avoiding deceptive patterns, although their companies generally lacked related policies. Business, design, and user-benefit reasons motivated the implementation of deceptive patterns; conversely, designers' values, possible business harms, and legal implications reduced the implementation. Our results advance current knowledge of why deceptive patterns are implemented and how designers reason through their actions from the perspective of their personal values and from an organizational perspective.
Mindsets, behavioral archetypes grounded in user beliefs and actions, are increasingly used in user-centered design (UCD) to communicate complex user behaviors. However, the lack of methodological rigor and transparency in the development of mindsets has limited their credibility and broader application. This study presents a structured six-step methodology for creating and validating mindsets from qualitative data, developed in the context of cybersecurity for micro and small businesses. Drawing from established practices and practitioner insights, this method integrates behavioral theory, thematic analysis, and evidence-based segmentation to produce distinct, actionable mindsets. Key steps include applying the MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) principle to distill qualitative data, identifying behavioral tensions to define the quadrant axes, conducting face-validity checks, and drawing on best practices from the extant persona literature. Our resulting mindsets were evaluated through an online survey of 20 professionals who are subject matter experts (SMEs) in cybersecurity. Results indicated high perceived validity and usability, with 75-80% of participants finding the mindsets highly representative and highly likely to improve support of micro and small businesses. Feedback highlighted usability strengths alongside areas for refinement, including the importance of making targeted engagement recommendations actionable as well as some concerns about naming conventions. Our findings suggest that this methodology produces mindsets that are empirically grounded, replicable, and practically useful for engagement design. This study contributes a validated, transferable framework for mindset creation that can be applied across domains in which understanding user motivation and behavior is critical.
This study investigates the unique role of beauty in digital interface design, moving beyond the traditional focus on usability and functionality. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, 27 university students engaged with both aesthetically rich (beautiful) and utilitarian (functional) versions of educational and commercial digital platforms. Quantitative results revealed that beautiful interfaces significantly enhance user engagement, trust, and intention to return, whereas qualitative data highlighted beauty's role in fostering motivation, emotional connection, and a sense of care. These effects were found to be robust across domains, suggesting that aesthetics play a foundational role in shaping meaningful digital experiences. By integrating philosophical, psychological, and human-computer interaction perspectives, this research addresses a critical gap: Although usability is well-studied, the societal and motivational impacts of digital beauty remain under-theorized. The author's findings advocate for a new design paradigm that positions beauty as a core value capable of driving user satisfaction, loyalty, and well-being. Practical recommendations for designers, educators, and policymakers aim to future-proof digital society through aesthetics as well as function.
Consumers are increasingly loyal to brands that are inclusive of them and their values, which promotes a sense of belonging. The goal of inclusive design is to design for the widest population possible; however, technology product inclusivity is a multifaceted concept that reflects consumer experience with a product, perceptions of trust, and ways to satisfy psychological needs. Technology products that foster a sense of belonging may promote perceptions of product quality, satisfaction, and usability. Although many measurement scales have been developed to assess consumer perceptions of technology products, no published scales exist to assess consumer perceptions of product inclusivity. The authors of this article adhered to best practices in scale development to generate an item pool based on a literature review, expert review, pilot studies, exploratory factor analysis (EFA; N = 785), and two confirmatory factor analyses (CFA; N = 677; CFA II; N = 588). We refined an initial pool of 194 items to a 25-item scale. Factor analyses indicate 5 factors contribute to the perceptions of product inclusivity: Personal Connection, Product Challenges, Confidence in Usage, Meets Expectations, and Company Empathy. The goal of developing this scale is to allow companies and product designers to measure how inclusive their technology product is, as well as to gain insight into areas of inclusivity that excel or could be improved.
Despite numerous empirical studies of practices in software development, little is known about cooperation between front-end developers and User Experience (UX) professionals. This paper provides insights into how front-end developers view UX professionals and what they expect from UX professionals. This is important for UX professionals who want to know their users to better cooperate with their stakeholders. Our study revealed insights obtained from UX professionals interviewing front-end developers. Seven teams comprising 10 experienced UX professionals participated in the study. Each team independently recruited and interviewed two or three experienced front-end developers from different organizations using a semi-structured interview format. There were 20 interviews in total. We used quotes from the front-end developers to derive four front-end developer personas that exemplify typical attitudes towards UX and UX research. Step-by-step descriptions of the development process, a Developer Journey Map, were extracted from the 20 interviews. There were striking similarities between the Developer Journey Maps. We created a general Developer Journey Map, focusing on touchpoints between front-end developers and UX professionals. Our key advice for UX professionals who want to improve cooperation with front-end developers includes the following: respect front-end developers as partners and engineers, rather than subordinates; support the front-end developer flow state by specifying, and helping them with, edge cases; and be available during implementation to answer questions quickly, and in order, to avoid interrupting their flow.
