-internally screaming-
This was a frustrating and anxiety inducing hell-scape of a game to navigate through (＋_＋) It felt like one of those escape rooms where you’re trying to find an exit, but the more you click around, the more dead ends you run into!
I first learned of ‘dark patterns’ in my Cognitive Systems undergrad courses on human cognition and design, from none other than Don Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things”. He introduces some foundational concepts in design, specifically affordances and signifiers, which I find most relevant to this task.
Affordances are "the possibilities in the world for how an agent (person, animal or machine) can interact with something." In other words, potential interactions between people and the environment. Signifiers are "signals" for what actions are possible and how they should be done. The must be perceivable signals (e.g. signs, labels, drawings, instructions, etc.) or else they fail to function.
In the slides below, I try and describe what makes these signifiers “unintuitive” or more maliciously, “misleading” when it comes to our everyday habits of navigating webspaces online.
Reflections
For this task, it seems like the signifiers are more important than affordances, as they communicate how to use the design.
In some ways, it almost presumes that there is an “expected” or “intended” way for users to interact with webspaces, whether it is through the many years of priming, or due to the fact that we are forced to change our interactions with each update and iteration of new software. Once we are habitualized to a certain way of interacting with the virtual environment, it almost becomes an expectation that all websites would follow this convention, and therefore our brains fall into autopilot mode, and that is where our attention fail us, especially in this game.
In true UI/UX Researcher style, I asked two of my roommates to play this game and observed their interactions. One of them happens to be a UI/UX designer themselves! Both of them struggled with navigating through these websites, and in similar places too!
For example, in the password set up stage, they both read aloud “your password can have at least 1 Cyrillic character” and both their reactions were “how do you even type Cyrillic characters!?” without registering the important “can have” part!!
Besides the “misleading signifiers” that miscommunicated what they actually meant, another great challenge of this game was “paying attention” to what we were doing — whether it was reading the instructions fully, or whether it was making sure that certain things corresponded with each other — it required one to exert more cognitive processing energy to respond correctly to not fall into their dark pattern traps!
References
Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things. MIT Press.