In Your Face!

This week’s task asked us to work our way through the game User Inyerface and take notice of the ways the design of the game manipulates our attention and responses along the way. 

From the beginning, I quickly became stumped and frustrated about how to move past the first page. My first instinct was to skim and scan the information out and just move right away to where I needed to click. It is as Brignull (2011) mentions in that, “People tend to start reading at the beginning of a piece of text and as they advance, an increasing percentage of people give up and do not read to the end.” This skim and scan did not get me very far as I soon realized that I needed to read with more purpose and actually decipher what was being asked of me. Soon I saw how I could navigate better if I just focused on exactly what the game was asking of me. As I worked my way through the Inyerface game, I quickly began to see how the game was gathering information from me and how it was guiding me to put information in or answer questions. With each question or direction along the way, I must admit that I second guessed what the game was asking. It reminds me of how most of the time we can easily interact with other information gathering platforms and not fully see how the information is gathered. We are for the most part pretty unaware of these dark patterns of deception that web and interaction designers use to guide users in different directions. Tristan Harris refers to this in his TedTalk (2017) when he says that the internet and technology are, “Competing for one thing, our attention,” and that, “The best way to get someone’s attention is to know how someone’s mind works.” One other aspect I wanted to speak to was the fact we were asked to see how “quickly” we could finish. I think this immediately made me try to skim more to help me improve my time, which ultimately probably cost me time as I was missing some of the subtle cues and misdirections that were in the game. I did make it to the end to see the famous Carlton dance within 10:07 minutes but certainly thought when I started that I would have cruised through faster.

This User Inyerface game, although frustrating, does show and give a better idea of how information can be gathered based on our response patterns within a time period. The game was challenging as just when you think you have things figured out, the game creates deliberate little distractions and frustrations along the way such as pop-up reminders of the time crunch or the annoying little help box that moves ever so slowly down when you try to get it out of the way. I can see how Brignull (2011) mentions that, “The level of deception is very subtle,” and it is enough that it reinforces how the game is also trying to understand our thought patterns and the way we think. It is as Harris (2017) mentions about, “The internet not evolving at random,” but rather going as fast as it can to learn more about how our brains work to gather information on the products we buy, how we interact with others on social media, what topics create critical discourse and so much more. The whole point of the User Inyerface game was to give us a better insight to those subtle deceptions of the dark patterns in how information is gathered and how it is used in social media, advertising, development of technology tools, apps,  etc., in order for them to improve their own businesses and steer us in certain directions. As we learn more about how information is gathered and how we are manipulated, hopefully we will also become more adept at understanding these persuasions and take control and push back against the way these companies manipulate us for their own end game and purposes.

References:

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

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention?language=en