Dark Patterns Across the Gambling User Journey: Evidence from an Australian Pilot Audit

This paper reports early findings from the Australian pilot of a cross-national audit examining manipulative interface design, or "dark patterns," across the online gambling user journey. Its central argument is that gambling harm can stem from products functioning as designed, not only from individual vulnerability, and that interface choices can steer users toward house-favourable actions and weaken autonomy. The authors distinguish between dark nudges, which exploit cognitive biases, and sludge, which adds friction to protective actions. The study is positioned as addressing a gap, since these concepts are well developed in privacy and e-commerce research but have received little attention in gambling.

The pilot examined 10 regulated Australian gambling sites spanning wagering, lottery, and keno, with 8 unregulated sites reserved for later analysis. Interface features were coded against a gambling-specific taxonomy and mapped onto a seven-phase user journey, with an instance recorded only where screenshots and navigation paths could reproduce the evidence. Structural friction was measured with a Clicks Ratio comparing the effort needed to open versus close an account, where a value below one indicates that leaving is harder than joining. The audit is explicitly descriptive and does not estimate prevalence of harm.

Several practices were documented. One site defaulted to combining separate single bets into multi-bets, obscuring true odds and making the combined bet the path of least resistance. Asymmetric friction was also observed: one site required four clicks to open an account but considerably more effort to close one, while another made closure easier than registration, suggesting that such friction reflects deliberate design rather than technical necessity. On a single platform, registration required one click that implicitly accepted all terms, whereas temporary self-exclusion demanded a lengthy multi-step process.

The authors conclude that manipulative designs appear throughout the user journey and that such practices largely fall outside current Australian regulation, identifying them as targets for future policy. They plan to expand the audit cross-nationally and extend the analysis to video game economies, including skin betting and cosmetic purchases.