I definitely did not feel like an interface legend while going through this. There were a few things I noticed and didn’t fall for (such as the time pop up) but the ones that did get me were:
- adding a capital letter to my password even though it said “should”
- caught on quickly that the placeholder text needed to be deleted, but it was certainly time consuming and annoying to deal with
- white box for “selected” for gender
- “select all” reselected all the boxes and it took me a few seconds to find “unselect all”
- took me an embarrassing amount of time to find the top row of boxes to check even though I thought it was strange that the bottom row had no boxes
- I spent too much time overthinking some of the chess boards before just selecting all of them (this stage took me more than half the total time in the game)
I also spent a bit of time agonizing over entering personal information as I wasn’t sure where it was going so I made some of it up. I was surprised that I was able to enter my “go-to” fake US zipcode (90210) and choose Canada as my country.
I consider myself to be someone who is fairly aware of advertising and dark patterns, especially when it comes to online shopping. For example, one of the online quilting shops I buy from will have the box below displayed when viewing an item.
This serves to promote a scarcity mindset to encourage shoppers to buy the item immediately. Others I’ve seen will say that there are only x items remaining and it is in 2x people’s carts. Or a website will have a big green “DOWNLOAD” button but the actual link to download the file is in small text below. It has taken me a while to become savvy and to see through these tactics and that has come through experience.
