Dark Haptics: Exploring Manipulative Haptic Design in Mobile User Interfaces

TL;DR

Dark Haptics investigates whether vibrotactile feedback can manipulate user decisions in mobile interfaces, extending the dark patterns literature beyond visuals. The authors design a between-subjects study with alarming haptic feedback applied to privacy-related questions in a campus survey, demonstrating that some participants reevaluated or changed their privacy-related answers. They document qualitative experiences showing perceived manipulation and autonomy concerns, and discuss limitations and ethical considerations. The work lays groundwork for future detection, mitigation, and responsible design of haptic interfaces to prevent deceptive practices.

Abstract

Mobile user interfaces abundantly feature so-called 'dark patterns'. These deceptive design practices manipulate users' decision making to profit online service providers. While past research on dark patterns mainly focus on visual design, other sensory modalities such as audio and touch remain largely unexplored. In this early work, we investigate the manipulative side of haptics, which we term as 'Dark Haptics', as a strategy to manipulate users. We designed a study to empirically showcase the potential of using a dark haptic pattern in a mobile device to manipulate user actions in a survey. Our findings indicate that our dark haptic design successfully influenced participants to forego their privacy after experiencing an alarming feedback for rejecting intrusive requests in the survey. As a first exploration of manipulative qualities of dark haptic designs, we attempt to lay the groundwork for future research and tools to mitigate harms and risks of dark haptics.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Illustration of the three Privacy Invasive Questions (PIQs) presented during the survey
• Figure 2: Waveforms of the haptic feedback that was designed for the user study