Well that was annoying and frustrating. 

First of all, what was that? I tried this “game” three times and then gave up. However, I do not like to give up. 

There were many challenges that I encountered.

1)    Scrolling to the bottom of the Terms & Conditions. 

•  I started to get Carpal Tunnel in my wrist. Then I googled how to quickly get to the bottom of a page. So I used alt and swiped down. Okay great. I was able to accept. 

2)    Figuring out a password

• Well that was fun. I was able to do all of the requirements for the password but then I needed a Cyrillic character. Yes I had to google what that was. I also figured out that it had to be 9 characters, one capital letter, one numerical, at least one letter from my email, and one Cyrillic character. (later on, I realized that it did not matter as long as your password contains one uppercase letter and one number.)

3)    The box that comes up from the bottom of the screen. 

• At first it was annoying because I could not get it to go away. Then I pressed, “send to bottom” and it was all good. After that I just ignored it.

4)    The “Hurry up, time is ticking!” box appeared. 

• Lock?? Unlock?? It was just messing with me. Then I read down at the bottom left that it said ©lose 2021. Very clever. It is annoying that it pops up every minute though. 

Have I been able to go past the first section…nope. I will keep at it.                        

I needed to google User Inyerface to see if I could gather any clues as to how to do it. So weird. I have done everything that it told me to do and I cannot move to the next section. I wonder what it is that is making it so I cannot move on. I really want to move forward in this game!!!

Many days later….

I gave myself a few days away from this game and decided to open it up in another browser. Yes that was the problem. I could not get past the first part as, I suppose, the game did not like that I was in Safari. Once I tried it in Chrome, I was able to get a time of 5:03 by going all the way to the end. 

Now that I know how this game works. I am going to try it again as I am competitive and want a much better end time. By trying it again, and knowing how everything works, I was able to get a time of 1:24. Not bad. I think that is good enough for me. 

To me, this type of User Inyerface game, or should I say an initial irritation, consisted of a “dark pattern” (Greenberg et al., 2014, p. 524). A dark pattern is “a type of user interface that appears to have been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things [that] are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind” (Greenberg et al. 2014, p. 524). User Inyerface successfully achieved this. The types of dark patterns that occured on the User Inyerface were trick questions, misdirection, bait and switch. According to Bringnull (2010), trick questions occur when an individual is “filling in a form [where] you respond to a question that tricks you into giving an answer you didn’t intend [, however] “[w]hen glanced upon quickly the question appears to ask one thing, but when read carefully it asks another thing entirely” (para. 1). Misdirection is when the “design purposefully focuses your attention on one thing in order to distract your attention from another ” (Bringnull, 2010, para. 6). Finally, according to Bringnull (2010), bait and switch is when an individual “set[s] out to do one thing, but a different, undesirable thing happens instead” (para. 6). Technology developers are able to think about and understand human psychology in a simple way that can easily be flipped over into the dark side (Bringnull, 2011).

In Harris’ (2017) TED talk, he mentions how social media, websites, and entertainment streaming companies, such as YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, and Snapchat, are racing for our attention as they control user’s behaviour intentionally. For example, Harris (2017) mentions that with Snapchat there are millions of teens that use this app every day and there is a Snap Streak that teens are addicted to where two people communicate with each other every day. Snapchat created this intentionally as it “gave two people something they don’t want to lose” as they want to maintain their streak so it does not disappear (Harris, 2017, 3:25). Ultimately, understanding and controlling human psychology allows for these technological companies to be successful as everyone that owns any piece of technology is affected and stimulated by these dark patterns and susceptible to the attention economy.

 

References 

Bringnull, H. (2010). Dark Pattern. https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern

Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.

Greenberg, S., Boring, S., Vermeulen, J., & Dostal, J. (2014). Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: A critical perspective. Paper presented at the 523-532. https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598541

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