This week the task required us to play the game User Inyerface to reflect on the patterns that webpage designers use to steer viewers’ attention.  It was not an easy task. I struggled at the beginning to avoid the big green “NO” button. Instead, I tried to click on the “click” with the underscore, but nothing happened. Clicked on the light blue “next page”, again nothing happened. After accidentally clicking on the word“HERE”, it finally took me to the next page for entering my personal information. Then I stressed out over the timer that popped up and questioned if I was doing something wrong. It took me a while to figure out how to turn off the timer but still panicked a bit every time it popped up. The checkboxes are tricky with the colour as well as the “select all” and “unselect all” options blended in the last column. I also hated the “I am not a robot” verification which asked me to check every picture on the screen. Reading every word, every line, and every option is the key to this game. The whole game was not pleasant but intriguing enough to make me think about how our attention and actions are easily manipulated by GUI.

As Bringnull (2011) stated, designers, based on psychological insights, can easily use dark patterns to deceptively manipulate users in business owners’ interests. A pop-up picture, a bold word, or a simple switch in sentence order, can drastically affect people’s decision-making. Yet these twists are so subtle that users hardly notice them. Even if they do notice, the trouble caused by the twists is too little for people to take action. Everyone who tried to cancel a subscription service probably had the experience of finding the tiny hard-to-see link for “yes, continue” on the other side of the “no, I’ll think again” option in the bright colourful box. In the examples given by Dr. Tufekci (2017), GUI can significantly affect people’s political involvement and there is much more that we do not know about, such as what selected information is delivered to certain groups of people to influence their thinking. It is terrifying to think how these subtle, seemingly harmless twists in GUI, data collection, and the use of algorithms are slowly persuading us to shift the way we think and act. 

We might be able to resist the distractors in the game, but resisting influences in a system that we relied on is difficult. We had an urgent call to raise awareness around this issue and include it in the internet safety curriculum.

Reference

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

Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en