Prompt template for a fictitious LLM agent in a content-flagging experiment

2025-07-29

AI Summary

This study addresses the practical challenge of translating Article 16 of the Digital Services Act (DSA)—an abstract legal obligation—into user-friendly, legally compliant content reporting mechanisms. Bridging disciplinary gaps among law, technology, and design, the paper introduces a “legal design” paradigm, employing expert workshops, multi-case qualitative analysis, and a compliance-driven UX evaluation framework in an interdisciplinary, participatory design process. Findings demonstrate that UX decisions—including interface prompts and reporting workflows—significantly shape user reporting behavior and regulatory compliance outcomes, empirically confirming that design functions not merely as an implementation tool but as a critical mediator in constructing legal meaning. The study contributes a reusable methodological pathway for operationalizing digital regulation and advances a human-centered, compliance-by-design paradigm.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Law, Justice, Regulation & Governance

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Ethical and legal aspects of web-scale data analysis, uses and collection practices
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content

Abstract

Digital regulations such as the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA) represent major efforts to shape human-centered and human rights-based frameworks for society. Yet, as these laws are translated into practice, challenges emerge at the intersection of technology, law, and design. This paper presents a qualitative case study examining how designers act as mediators between abstract legal requirements and real-world digital experiences for users, focusing on the design of content reporting mechanisms under Article 16 of the DSA. Through an expert workshop with professional designers from diverse fields (N=9), we explore how legal obligations are interpreted by designers and reflected in discussions and design solutions. Our findings resonate with previous research on the design of reporting mechanisms and dark patterns, highlighting how UX design choices can mislead or hinder users' decision-making and therefore also highlighting the crucial role of design decisions. We show how participatory design methods can bridge disciplinary divides, making legal obligations accessible in compliance fostering design solutions. By using legal design as a lens, we argue that the co-creation of digital regulations and user experience is a core site for digital humanism; where designers, engineers, and legal scholars must collaborate to ensure that systems uphold legal standards to address the challenge the regulation poses to these disciplines.

Problem

• Examining designers' role in translating legal requirements into user experiences
• Exploring how UX design choices impact user decision-making under regulations
• Bridging disciplinary gaps to align digital regulations with human-centered design

Innovation

• Qualitative case study on designer mediation
• Participatory design bridges legal-tech gaps
• Legal design ensures human-centered compliance