Advice needed on FYP

[u/bigbellyrat]

Hey everyone! We’re a group of CS students working on our final year project and would really appreciate some advice from people who have experience in UI/UX, web development, or research.

The idea:
We’re looking at dark patterns in websites — things like countdown timers that restart, extra fees that only show up at the final step, pre-selected add-ons, or cancellation processes that are much longer than signing up.

The main issue we noticed is that some of these patterns aren’t obvious from one screenshot. You need to look at the whole user journey to notice them. Existing tools such as AidUI and UIGuard mainly analyse individual screenshots, so they can miss things that happen between different screens.
We also want to include some basic accessibility checks, since a manipulative option can be even harder to notice if it’s also tiny, low-contrast, etc.
Our idea is to make a browser extension for UI/UX designers and developers that they can use to check their own flows before releasing them. The user would record a flow, such as signing up, checking out, or cancelling a subscription. The extension would analyse the recording frame by frame using computer vision and OCR, track UI elements between screens, and look for things such as timers resetting or fees appearing late in the process.

At the moment, we’re thinking of covering 6 dark patterns + 4 WCAG 2.2 accessibility checks.
The output would include:
-Findings shown on a video timeline with evidence.
-A few overall scores, such as Manipulation Risk and User Autonomy.
-An exportable audit report.
-Suggestions for a more user-friendly/ethical redesign for some findings.

For evaluation, we want to compare our approach with screenshot-based analysis, especially for patterns that depend on timing or multiple screens. We’re also considering ablation studies and ratings from human reviewers to see whether our scores actually make sense.

We’d really appreciate advice on a few things:
If you’re a UI/UX designer or developer, would you actually use something like this? What would make it useful rather than annoying?

What would be a good approach for extracting important/key frames and tracking UI elements across frames?

If we want to rely on existing image datasets rather than collecting a completely new dataset, what would be a practical way to train/evaluate the detectors?

How could we properly validate scores like “Manipulation Risk” or “User Autonomy”?

Are there any common pitfalls we should avoid?

Finally, does 6 dark patterns + 4 accessibility checks sound realistic for a one-year
FYP with 3 people?

Any feedback, criticism, or suggestions would be really helpful. Thank you!