Last page of Inyerface game.

For this task, we had to work through the frustrating user interface design game “Inyerface”. The game is designed to be extremely frustrating, and I can confirm that my anxiety and frustration went up several notches trying to complete it! The interface does not behave as you expect it to. For example, to begin the game you must select the word HERE even though the I wanted to select the word click because it is underlined, which usually signifies to a user that there is a hyperlink.

The pop-up timer window really got to me as well. When I first encountered it, I could not figure out how to close the window, so I pressed the big button labelled Lock which got me stuck in a loop of pressing lock and unlock. At this point I reloaded the game and tried again. The next time the timer popped up, I noticed the small, grey close button in the bottom left corner of the window and was able to proceed with the game. Also, the timer made me nervous as I thought I would get kicked out of the game if I did not complete it before the timer finished. It took me a while to notice that the timer was meaningless because it counted time up, not down.

This activity made me reflect on the fact that user interface is a language of its own. One of the reasons the game is frustrating is because it does not follow the “grammar” or “syntax” of user interface which we are all accustomed to. We expect certain elements such as buttons, fields, hyperlinks, and drop-downs to behave in certain ways and when they don’t it is jarring. We have all worked with individuals who have little to no experience with computers. These folks move through online interfaces such as forms and webpages very slowly because they do not know the interface language yet.

Coincidentally, I ran into poor user interface design this week. Recently, I signed up for a Scene card so that I could take advantage of deals when I shop at a grocery chain called Thrifty Foods. At first, I did not want to get a Scene card and had resisted getting one for several months. But from time-to-time I shop at Thrifty Foods and if I had the Scene card, I could save several dollars on my purchases. When I signed up for the Scene card, I unchecked any boxes related to receiving emails from this company. However, yesterday an email came through from Scene and I promptly scrolled down the email to select the Unsubscribe button. A new webpage came up, which you can see below.

Poor design or dark pattern?

Do you notice anything annoying here, other than the right justified text? That’s right. There is no “unselect all” or “unsubscribe from all” button so I had to click on each of those boxes to deselect them. How annoying! I am curious if this is just poor interface design or actually a dark pattern designed to frustrate me enough that I give up and not take the time to deselect from all of their emails.

Like social media marketing, these loyalty cards are used by mega grocery corporations (ex., Pattison Food Group, Empire Company Limited, George Weston Limited, and Costco Wholesale Corporation) to track consumer spending in the hopes of gathering data to inform their business and marketing practices. In exchange for saving a few bucks and collecting points, these companies receive my personal information (ex., name, gender, birthday, address etc.) and can track my spending habits not only at a grocery store but all the other stores they own under their corporate umbrella and build a sophisticated profile about my sending habits. Not only that, but these companies also influence my future spending by sending me personalized offers and promotions. They are vying for my attention and the precious little time I have each week to buy groceries. Some may say that this is a fair exchange between consumer and corporation but the truth is that we do not know how our data is handled and being used by these companies behind closed doors.