Colin M. Gray

Positions Learning Experience Design (LXD) not as a separate field but as a distinct philosophical stance within instructional design. Using concepts of design knowledge and philosophy, the article discusses how LXD can enrich ID practice and scholarship while coexisting with other philosophies.

This paper presents an end-user–centered account of manipulation in digital services, extending notions of dark patterns. Through an English and Mandarin survey (n=169) and follow-up interviews, the authors analyze felt experiences of manipulative products and develop a continuum of manipulation grounded in qualitative insights and quantitative analysis. The work culminates in implications for research and policy and guidance aimed at empowering users to assert more autonomy in their digital experiences.

Consent banners are ubiquitous features of web interactions, yet perspectives from design, user studies, and law are rarely integrated. The authors mobilize the language of dark patterns and use interaction criticism to analyze three common types of consent banners through designer, interface, user, and social-context lenses. They reveal tensions among legal, ethical, and design guidance, identify where dark pattern strategies manipulate users away from their interests, and point to opportunities for transdisciplinary dialogue that can translate matters of ethical concern into public policy.

Interest in critical scholarship on UX practice is expanding, yet vocabulary for describing and assessing criticality is lacking. This paper outlines the limits of a specific ethical phenomenon known as “dark patterns,” in which user value is supplanted by shareholder value. Using a corpus of practitioner-identified cases, the authors perform a content analysis that reveals a wide range of ethical issues often conflated under the umbrella of dark patterns and a shared concern that UX designers can become complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. They conclude with implications for UX education and practice and a call to broaden research on the ethics of user experience.

The paper argues for a heightened view of designer responsibility and design process in an ethical framing within instructional design and technology. Drawing on methods and frameworks of ethical responsibility from the broader design community, the authors analyze design cases to demonstrate how ethical concerns frequently arise in authentic practice. They propose increased documentation of design precedent and the use of critical designs to foreground ethical and value-related concerns in instructional design education, research, and practice.

As interest grows in UX work practices, this study examines how UX designers conceive of design methods and which are essential as baseline competencies for beginners. Based on interviews with practitioners across companies and experience levels, the paper proposes an appropriation-oriented mindset that drives the use of tool knowledge to support practice in varied corporate contexts. The analysis contrasts methods in use versus those forming a beginning competency set, and frames an agenda for research and education that emphasizes adaptive, situated method use over rote, deterministic procedure.

An exploratory field study observed eight practicing instructional designers at two consulting firms to characterize design practice on its own terms. Using Nelson and Stolterman’s design judgment framework, the analysis shows judgments occur frequently, often in clustered or layered ways rather than as discrete events. Judgments were shaped by firm context, designer role, and project/client factors.