Investigating User Preference on Visual Countermeasures Against Deceptive Patterns

Deceptive patterns manipulate users by influencing their decision-making in favor of service providers. Due to their omnipresence in apps and online, effective countermeasures against these manipulations are crucial. One promising approach is to apply visual countermeasures that alter the content and appearance of deceptive patterns on the user's end. Examples include hiding the manipulation completely and highlighting and explaining the manipulation. We present an online study (n=61) that investigated three concepts of visual countermeasures against commonly used deceptive patterns. Compared to related work, our participants generally chose to hide manipulations or leave them unchanged more frequently. Overall, our work extends and strengthens results from previous research for a larger participant sample, allowing a deeper understanding of user preferences for visual countermeasures.