It took me a grand total of seven minutes and eighteen seconds to finish the exercise, which I feel is probably pretty standard given the obvious design challenges. To be honest, I’m a pretty big fan of brain teasers, and I do have an interest in UX design, so despite my frustrations I found this to be a pretty entertaining task.
Something I found interesting about the game is how it used multiple modes of communication to manipulate the user. Vague and misleading text was present pretty much everywhere but it also flipped the script on other tradition signifiers. For example it’s pretty much universally understood that the color green refers to “yes” but in this case, it actually corresponded to a negative response, which was pretty confusing right from the get-go.
Unfortunately for me, things didn’t really get any easier as the exercise continued. Nothing really behaved as expected. Drop down menus asking to select a date defaulted to the year 1900, not the present year, resulting in far more scrolling than necessary. Months were listed in alphabetical order, not chronological. Even once I finally managed to navigate the menus and indicate my date of birth, it still asked me to enter my age, which should be totally unnecessary.
The section where I was required to enter biographical information (name, title, gender) certainly gave me pause for thought. The fields of entry were all quite counter-intuitive which was to be expected at this point. However what I found especially interesting is that the form required me to select a gender that matched my “title”. For example, when I chose “Mr.” as my title but “female” as my gender, it gave me an error message and did not allow me to process. This got me thinking about the nature of asking for personal information in the first place, and why it is even necessary to do so. UX issues aside, why does it matter if my gender matches my title? Or to take it a step further, why do I need to indicate my gender or title at all?
Recently in my role at Capilano University I participated in a gender diversity audit, where we took a close look at the information we ask students to submit to the institution. Something we discovered in this process was that there is so much biographical info we ask for that we don’t actually use in any meaningful way. Sex as assigned at birth doesn’t appear on class lists, transcripts, diplomas or other documentation. So why ask for it at all? As a result of this audit, we’ve begun eliminating unnecessary data points from our student systems at CapU and the student body is very pleased with this. I think moving forward, we’ll be seeing more institutions take a more intentional approach when asking for personal information- only collect what is necessary.
This is especially important when filling out forms on the internet, because you can never be quite sure who exactly this information is being shared with. Typically you do have to provide consent, however the legal language can be vague and confusing. In the exercise for this task, it only asked me to accept cookies at the END of the process, which is certainly not a best practice when it comes to data collection and privacy.
Overall, this was a pretty entertaining exercise. I felt it was a great demonstration of what NOT to do when asking for people to share information. Hopefully these are lessons I can continue to bring forward with me in my professional practice.