Week 8 – Infographic – Researcher

This week we created the infographic, a poster with information about Dark Patterns. My role as one of the researchers involved sourcing the secondary research for the poster. The research I wanted to collect were more question and answer based: for example, information around the question ‘what is a dark pattern?’. Firstly, I gathered research on the definition of a dark pattern and who coined the term and when. Then I found a website ‘The Danger of Dark Patterns’ (https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/dark-patterns) which included examples of the different types of Dark Patterns, with examples of when each would appear.

I then found practical examples on how to avoid each of these Dark Patterns when faced with them. I wanted to keep the research visually friendly, with quick short facts that would engage a wide audience. As we are going to be posting our Instagram stories and posts so the information would have to be engaging and informative. Moreover, for the Instagram story I wanted to create multiple choice questions for the poll feature on the stories, these questions included ‘who knows what a Dark Pattern is?’, ‘who has experienced any examples of dark patterns?’.

These questions we hope will involve our followers and educate them in what and how Dark Patterns affect us. This connects with the infographic as it outlines the main focuses of our campaign, I also found some facts and figures about dark patterns and any studies regarding which groups of people they effect and catch out the most. Paraphrasing the most important information was a challenge, but essential to keeping the infographic engaging. In reflection I felt the production of the infographic went well as the Product manager had clearly outlined all of our roles and added suggestions to what we could include and any examples they thought could work within our individual roles and how we could overlap certain roles to get the best outcome. We worked collaboratively as a group; each member of the group posted their individual role plan on our shared One Drive so all members were informed throughout. However, the most challenging obstacle we had to overcome was that we had two members of the group being researcher role, and we both did separate research.

However, by communicating and working together we created a research plan incorporating both of our ideas which worked really well. By collaborating we included a larger field of research, which we could then narrow down into the most important aspects we wanted to include.