Task #10: The Attention Economy

 

Introduction

    This assignment was a lesson in marketing and a reflection on my previous experiences designing web sites in the early 2000s. The user interface followed the same rules with layering and masking buttons, but it was the way the user interface disrupted what I was reading that really caught my attention. Even in the title of “User Inyerface”, I didn’t notice the subtle but now obvious ploy of insulting the user as I read it as User Interface, the “inyerface” was a funny and jarring change to the title.

How the GUI manipulated my attention

  The user inyerface plays with many concepts of marketing finding ways to drive the Conative, Affective and Cognitive domain for the consumer to act on bringing the product home (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961). However in this case, the philosophies that drive consumer behaviour are amped up to illustrate how these philosophies are mobilized in the  age of social media and the user interfaces of today. Lavidge and Steiner (1961) point out that the process of getting a customer to buy something happens in steps, in that the way advertisements draw you in slowly create a sense of long-term sense of having the product, and so there are ways to deliberately drawing in customers not just for the immediate buy but drawing in various others using different steps. 

    In the game and in real life, within the facets of the digital age, the mechanism of process, deliberate slow intention and an emphasis on “long-term” marketing has made way for  ways to control the user rather than to learn from the consumers (Harris, 2017). In the Inyerface game, you’re drawn in by the colour of green even though the text says no. This control of the screen facilitates the intention for the clicks to be centered in the button. The immediate gratification of the mouse changing its shape and the BIG GREEN BUTTON all says “click me”. In reality, the word here was the second likely chance. The manipulation of the image over the plain text of here shows how user interface and gratifying rewards pushes the user to bend logic in pursuit of following a well designed button (Harris, 2017).

  In designing web pages in the early days, I would be able to float my mouse and figure out where to click to find layers in webpages to configure users into appropriate areas, but in this case, I wasn’t able to resist the big green button on the screen, which goes to show the power of manipulative user interfaces prevalent in many web pages (Harris, 2017). 

 

   How the GUI manipulated my responses

   During this process, the majority of the time was to try to get to the end of the game. There were tricks in user design such as trying to find hidden hot spots or queue myself in finding the quickest way to finish the game. But this game did a thorough job in making sure that the cues that I was used to (such as highlights or buttons) were shifted so that by clicking them I was actually slowing myself down. This was evidenced by Tufekci (2017) point in advertisement methods to keep me, I wasn’t doing the appropriate thing which was to read with my eyes, I was instead trying to find cues to make things go faster to my own detriment.

  However, I had to respond the way that the game wanted me to respond, I needed to finish the activity. That was one of the manipulations that this game made me do which was to make functions obsolete until I could do this.

Reflections 

  One of the big reflections for me was a quote that has always stuck with me was with Orwell (1949) “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”. In the Inyerface game, my initial reactions were to follow user interface techniques that I was used too and later to speed up reactions, I just did with the interface needed me to do to get through the game. Whether that was madly clicking on check marks or waiting patiently for windows to disappear to proceed. Had I just read the plain text instructions in the sections, I would have been able to get through the game, but my learned behaviour created the forced function of having me click through to satisfy my serotonin release (Harris, 2017). 

   Tufecki (2017), notes that the first thing we should do to admit we have a problem is to realize that we can be manipulated. For me the power of the user interface was more pertinent in my internet ingrained-ness that I realized.  I could find how I could get trapped in the algorithm like a swarm when it would recognize what my interests were. To go back to the George Orwell quote at the beginning of this post, sometimes we have to trust what our eyes and ears are seeing and realize that we are in an aggressive form of marketing, one that does a great job at making us lose a part of ourselves.

References

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day [Video]. TED.

Lavidge, R. J., & Steiner, G. A. (1961). A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness.Links to an external site. Journal of Marketing, 25(6), 59–62. 

Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. Secker and Warburg.

Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads  [Video]. TED.