For this task, I completed a short game called User Inyerface that brings users’ attention to UI design in a frustrating way.
From the very first moment, User Inyerface effectively used design tactics to throw me off. The game sends you through a form that mimics many online forms, but with added barriers of deliberately infuriating design choices. For instance, the very first question asks you to choose a password. Already confused about the point of this game, I tried to input my go-to password, only to find that the greyed-out “Choose password” text in the input box was actually text that had to be deleted before entering your password. I finished the rest of the form only to find a long list of password requirements at the very bottom of the page – None of which I had yet met!
Playing the game allowed me to understand jsut how much of today’s user design choices has already been decided upon. For instance: the colour of buttons on the web. It seems to be a common unspoken design principle that the larger, coloured button is the button that is being proposed as a suggestion to the user. The buttons in the game were deliberately reversed with the smaller, opaque button being the button the user is more likely to select. The developers of this quiz used that unconscious understanding against the user, putting the least commonly used button in the design forefront to throw the user off.
Even though the game is meant as an exaggeration of bad practices, I found myself thinking of my own frustrating past experiences. The captcha example in this game was deliberately vague (asking you to identify such things as glasses when the pictures contained eye glasses, drink glasses and panes of glass). This is not actually that different from other captchas I have experienced where the subject of the photo can be vague or partially fit the description. As a part of this game though, you can see just how frustrating this vagueness is. Almost like a satirical version of real-life captchas!
I had not heard the concept of “Dark Patterns” before playing this game and reading the article by Brignull (2010), though I was deeply aware of manipulative design practices. The game, User Inyerface is exceptionally useful at bringing your attention to poor design practices by throwing them all at you at once. The explicit intention of the game seems to be to bring attention to poor design choices, but also to make the user reflect on what makes good design work so well. For myself, I feel like I will go into future web experiences being able to note the design practices and better discern the intentions of the creator.