Well, I can wholeheartedly say that I despise this website. The level of frustration that I felt in this game was almost unbelievable. It felt like a perpetual cycle of exercises in futility. No matter what I did, it did not seem to make things work. The extreme frustration caused by the user input system combined with very low clarity in what was expected of the user created a situation in which I was ready to do anything to be done with this god forsaken game. It honestly made me feel like I was being held hostage while I was trying to finish the game.
Brignull’s (2011) point about how companies can use UI to create a greater conversion rate was very much at the forefront of my mind while fighting with User Inyerface. I spent nearly 14 minutes clicking around on this website trying to input data and get this task done. All of that time and all of those clicks can be converted into interactions and could potentially boost the sales potential of a website by showing boosted interactions and usage time. This would make it easier to sell adspace and the only cost to the company is making task completion in their user interface take a little longer.
As Harris (2017) mentions in his TED talk, I do feel that these companies need to have held to a greater level of accountability to prevent them from being able to manipulate a user into giving up their time and energy. Projects like darkpatterns.org are also incredibly important for tracking and calling out companies for employing shady tactics in order to manipulate users out of time and money. It will be very interesting to see what the future holds for web design and structure from both a legal and moral standpoint.
References:
Brignull, H. (2011, November 1). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. A List Apart. https://alistapart.com/article/dark-patterns-deception-vs-honesty-in-ui-design/
Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day [Video]. TED Talks. https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_how_a_handful_of_tech_companies_control_billions_of_minds_every_day?language=en
User Inyerface – A worst-practice UI experiment. (n.d.). https://userinyerface.com/game.html