Design Principles for Cookie Banners: Balancing Legal Compliance and Usability

Ever since the GDPR and the related legal framework came into force, web users come across and interact with cookie banners extremely often while navigating. These short but numerous interactions sum up to a considerable effort, which becomes even bigger when cookie banners are poorly designed or deliberately try to deceive users in giving full consent. This article investigates the issue of cookie banner design, considering both the legal and the usability requirements that should be respected to allow users adequate control over their data while browsing the web. It also critically examines widely used design patterns for cookie banners in terms of GDPR and usability compliance and provides a set of cookie banner design guidelines, emphasizing the importance of balancing transparency, simplicity, and control in banner design while avoiding dark patterns and consent fatigue.