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Case study · UX Compliance / AI Auditing

Exposing manipulative UX before it reaches users.

An agentic auditing platform that scans live websites, detects deceptive design patterns and produces explainable reports for compliance, UX and legal teams.

Client
Dark Patterns Laboratory
Industry
UX Compliance / AI Auditing
Delivery
SaaS platform and AI agent infrastructure
Capability
AI Agents & Automation

The challenge

What Dark Patterns Laboratory was up against.

High-traffic travel and booking sites often use subtle pressure tactics such as fake scarcity, false urgency and confirm-shaming. They are dynamic and hard to prove, and manual audits don’t scale.

  • Fake scarcity and misleading urgency
  • Countdown timers creating false pressure
  • Confirm-shaming messages
  • Intent hard to prove from screenshots

The solution

What we built.

Skugal built a platform that uses LLMs and autonomous agents to analyse text and UI context, turning subjective UX concerns into structured, explainable findings.

01

Automated website scanning

Crawls live pages of leading travel and eCommerce sites, capturing DOM and visible UI, including timers and pop-ups.

02

LLM pattern detection

Prompt-engineered classification of scarcity, urgency, confirm-shaming and pressure nudges, interpreting intent rather than keywords.

03

Agentic analysis workflow

Separate agents for extraction, analysis, validation and explanation improve accuracy and auditability.

04

Explainable audit reports

What was flagged, why, and how it maps to published UX research, written for non-technical stakeholders.

How it works

From input to outcome.

  1. Website crawl
  2. Content & DOM extraction agent
  3. LLM pattern analysis agent
  4. Validation & classification agent
  5. Explanation & report agent

Business impact

What changed.

Dark Patterns Laboratory now runs a scalable AI auditing system that monitors high-traffic websites and flags deceptive UX before it goes unnoticed.

Technology

  • LLM classification
  • Web crawling & DOM capture
  • Multi-step agent pipeline
  • Report generation
  • Dramatically less manual UX audit effort
  • Pre-launch compliance checks for businesses
  • Evidence-backed explanations for regulators
  • More transparency in high-impact consumer journeys
Manipulative design thrives in ambiguity. This platform brings clarity at scale.

Next step

Have a similar challenge?

Tell us about the workflow or product. We’ll come back with an architecture, a delivery plan and where AI agents fit.

ISO 9001:2015 certificate issued to Skugal Technologies Private Limited, certificate number QD-98140/1125

Quality management system

ISO 9001:2015 Certified

Skugal Technologies Private Limited has been independently assessed and found to comply with ISO 9001:2015 for providing quality IT services and software development solutions.

Certificate No.
QD-98140/1125
Standard
ISO 9001:2015
Issued
24 Nov 2025
Valid until
23 Nov 2028
Certification body
Revolutionary Certifications Services (RCS Cert)

Client ID 95268. Validity is subject to annual surveillance audits (next due 23 Nov 2026). Verify at thesasl.co.uk.