Hana Habib
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Many websites have added cookie consent interfaces to meet regulatory consent requirements. While prior work has demonstrated that they often use dark patterns - design techniques that lead users to less privacy-protective options - other usability aspects of these interfaces have been less explored. This study contributes a comprehensive, two-stage usability assessment of cookie consent interfaces. We first inspected 191 consent interfaces against five dark pattern heuristics and identified design choices that may impact usability. We then conducted a 1,109-participant online between-subjects experiment exploring the usability impact of seven design parameters. Participants were exposed to one of 12 consent interface variants during a shopping task on a prototype e-commerce website and answered a survey about their experience. Our findings suggest that a fully-blocking consent interface with in-line cookie options accompanied by a persistent button enabling users to later change their consent decision best meets several design objectives.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501985
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)