“Okay, whatever”: An Evaluation of Cookie Consent Interfaces

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.