User Inyerface– This was the most frustrating activity I have ever encountered!

I had such difficulty, getting started. I first thought I had too many programs running on my laptop because I felt it was lagging. When the agreement page kept popping up, it was impossible to close it. Usually by getting to the end of the page- you can press the bottom arrow, but that did not work. I could not see “x” to close the box. All I could see was the timer that kept running, which made me really anxious. I realized that I wasn’t going to get through this without a YouTube  “how to video”. This is the one I watched.

After watching a quick ‘how to video”. I noticed all the flaws on the website.

The overall the design of the website was terrible. Many of the intents were unclear- button to close windows were not indicated, many emphasis were made where it shouldn’t have been there. Such as underlines were placed where it didn’t belong, capitalizes were placed where it shouldn’t have.

Additional triggers that were placed on the page were timers, auto-arrangement of the page (alignment was off- when you have to verify pictures).  These were some of the features that made it difficult to complete this challenge. For myself it was mostly the timer and the formatting of activity -blue colour, had a small sized page that made it even more challenging to complete the task. The purpose of the website was really to capture that our attention was important- where was the focus being placed? Are you paying attention. I would sum it off as ‘thinking outside of the box’, clearly a clever activity to make you think about where attention is being placed.

With this week’s TED talk, I really resonated to the statement of, “A race to attention – to know how someone’s mind works” (Harris,2017). There are so many auto-plays that we do not even notice that are happening. How much are we paying attention to what is being presented to us online? So many online distractions are happening where they are trying to entice audience and capture our attention. Be wary and be informed about what is being presented to you.

References:

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talk/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