Skip to content
Exploitative Patternsin Games

Persuasive design

Also: persuasion

Influence that appeals to rational agency; the legitimate sibling of manipulation.

Persuasion appeals to a person’s reasons and evidence and is generally legitimate. It crosses into manipulation when it bypasses or subverts rational agency — exploiting bias, emotion, or hidden influence. UX practitioners report this line is genuinely blurred in practice and shaped by commercial pressure.

See also

References

  1. Wilkinson, T. M. (2013). Nudging and manipulation. Political Studies. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00974.x · citing patterns
  2. Sánchez Chamorro, L.; Bongard-Blanchy, K.; Koenig, V. (2023). Ethical tensions in UX design practice: Exploring the fine line between persuasion and manipulation in online interfaces. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596013 · citing patterns
  3. Chang, W. J.; Seaborn, K.; Adams, A. A. (2024). Theorizing deception: A scoping review of theory in research on dark patterns and deceptive design. Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24). doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650997 · citing patterns