"An Ad Posing as Medical Advice": User Accounts of Dark UX in FemTech mHealth Apps

DOI

FemTech is an emerging industry offering products, software, and services to support women’s health and well-being. Within FemTech, mobile health applications (mHealth apps) are popular for managing menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, and menopause. Yet, these apps expose users to deceptive and misleading practices, which can be characterized as Dark Patterns in user experience (or dark UX). Dark UX in commercial FemTech mHealth apps is underexplored, leaving a critical gap in understanding how deceptive patterns manifest in intimate health contexts, the harms they cause, and how to address them. We crowd-source and thematically analyze user accounts of dark UX through user reviews from sixteen systematically selected FemTech mHealth apps. User-reported accounts of dark UX in FemTech mHealth apps reveal several problematic design patterns, which emphasize risks for minors and the need for more transparent design of FemTech mHealth apps. Based on our results, we outline recommendations for enhancing ethical UX design and furthering regulatory action in FemTech.