Identifying Deceptive Patterns Across Three Age Groups: A Heuristic-Based Cognitive Walkthrough Study of Mobile Apps
This study identifies age-specific tailoring of deceptive patterns in mobile apps, highlighting the need for ethical design guidelines to protect vulnerable user groups.
A heuristic-based cognitive walkthrough of 30 mobile apps across 6 categories found that 93% use the nagging deceptive pattern, with entertainment apps containing significantly more deceptive patterns than other categories, and older adults' entertainment apps using sneaking patterns more frequently than those for teens or adults.
Deceptive patterns are tactics used to manipulate users into performing unintended actions. Today, many of these deceptive patterns are implemented in mobile apps targeting diverse age groups. In this paper, we employ a heuristic-based cognitive walkthrough to explore how deceptive patterns are tailored to three age groups, specifically teens (12-17), adults (18-49), and older adults (50+), across different app categories. By analyzing 30 apps spanning 6 categories, we found that 93% of these apps use the nagging pattern. Furthermore, our findings reveal that entertainment apps contain significantly more deceptive patterns than other app categories, such as music/books. Our data also shows that entertainment apps for older adults use sneaking patterns more frequently than entertainment apps for teens or adults. These findings call for the development of more ethical, age-specific design guidelines to protect users from targeted digital manipulation attempts.