The online game User Inyerface was an interesting experience. It reminded me of an escape room in which you never know if what you are choosing will help or hinder your progress. I played the User Inyerface game two times. The first time I clicked on the terms and conditions. The scroll bar to get through all the terms and conditions moves at a snail pace and there are so many pages to get through, so I quit and restarted the game. I knew I had made a key mistake! On my second try, I spent more time looking and reading things before clicking. There were so many ways in which the GUI is designed to manipulate attention and responses. For example, the game was timed. I am a competitive person so this created a sense of urgency. I wanted to go quickly, but after what happened my first try, I also wanted to read over what I was doing. This lead me to scan the pages, allowing deception by the game as key information was buried in text and was easily overlooked when scanning the page (Brignull, 2011). From being constantly reminded of the time, the use of colors opposite than one would think (ex. green for No, as opposed to red), and clicking on a word instead of what appeared to be a link, to the order of the text boxes that had to be manually deleted, and the ‘I am not a robot’ pages that were open to interpretation, the game was a struggle. Things that I had become familiar with from time spent online, were not the correct choices. The game purposely manipulated me into clicking on specific things.
Tristen Harris (2017) spoke of how the internet is not evolving at random and there is a hidden goal of gaining our attention. This can be accomplished in various ways, but “auto play” was one example that Tristan Harris (2017) used in his Ted talk. Zeynep Tufekci (2017) spoke of persuasion architecture and how both the physical and online world can be designed to persuade us. As I listened to their TED talks, I was reminded of some of my undergrad courses in human geography. The auto play example in the online world that Harris (2017) discussed can be related to the hallways and aisles in malls and casinos. Malls and casinos are designed to appear never-ending. When one hallway or aisle ends, the next begins. Malls and casinos have a hidden goal of gaining time from the customers because the more time that is spent in the facilities generally means more money being spent. There are also other architectural features that are designed to help accomplish this goal. The exits are not easily visible or they are at the end of long hallways. There are no windows so the customers are removed from the outside world and don’t know if it is getting dark outside, snowing etc. And lastly, there are no clocks so the customers have no idea how much time has gone by while inside the mall or casino. This persuasion architecture has been a part of our physical world for many years and it is no wonder that it has expanded to the online world which now makes up a big part of our daily lives. It is scary to think of how much we are persuaded in both the physical and online world, and even scarier to think of how often we are completely oblivious to it!
References
Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.
Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention?language=en
Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en