This was an interesting task to complete. I would’ve gotten to the completion page sooner but I was taking notes on every deception and annoyance the website is trying to put onto the user while completing the task. One of the subjects I’ve taught in my career is game design and a couple of the core principles of game design apply to this website as I was reflecting upon this task. When designing games, it’s important to build them with the player in mind and optimize the player experience. To do this there are many considerations such as user feedback and telegraphing. I believe both of these things apply to website design as well, especially the forms the task asked us to fill.

When playing a game, it’s important for the player to know when they think they’ve done something. Games usually have feedback in place to confirm the player’s action. For example, when attacking an enemy there are usually sound effects, visual effects, damage bars, etc. to confirm that the attack happened. This makes game play more straightforward and avoids any confusion from the player. In the website, there were buttons that didn’t respond as a regular button would. It didn’t highlight when the mouse was hovered over it, it didn’t change colours when pressed, and the cursor did not change to the hand with the finger icon. All this goes into giving the user feedback that this is a button and that it’s working. Another instance of lack of user feedback was not being able to create a proper password without proper feedback for what was needed. I had to try a number of different passwords that seemingly met with the password criteria but it still would not let me proceed to the next page without any message to tell me what was missing.

Another consideration when making games is predictability. The mechanics within the game need to be consistent and sometimes predictable. Predictability is sometimes called telegraphing in video games. An example of telegraphing is seeing a certain enemy animation happen and knowing the attack that will happen shortly after because you’ve encountered this enemy before and learned that the attack follow the animation. In the website, what users would normally expect a yes button for cookies on a website would do is to agree to the cookies policies. However, the yes button in this case refers to if the user has a problem accepting the cookies. This is not what a regular user would predict and can create confusion for the user. Another example of this from the website is the use of double negatives that confuses the user. On the password page, there was a statement “your password is not unsafe”. This create extra work for the user to figure out the double negative and to decide their next course of action.

On top of all this, there were lots of non-user-friendly features in the website that made progressing through the forms difficult.

• Unhelpful pop-ups and the time it took to dismiss the pop-ups were unnecessarily long.
• Needing to delete information in a fillable area before inputting your information
• Irrelevant or un-ordered information from a drop down menu
• Can’t directly type in information for some fillable areas and have to use sliders and buttons to get to the right information
• Creating difficulty by using captchas that can have multiple meanings

Overall, the task was eye opening on how users are accustomed to filling out forms and browsing websites. The website demonstrated how easy it would be to manipulate the user by placing hidden information or forcing users to make assumptions about the forms to misguide the user.