Task 10- Attention Economy

As stated by Bagaar on their website, if a user can simply focus on the task at hand and does not notice the interface they’re working off of, the design is a success. Their game, User Inyerface, was created to have the opposite effect. It does away with user assumptions that the UI will do the hard work and guide you seamlessly through the required steps and instead presents itself like a puzzle to solve that goes against all your prior conditioning while navigating the web.

This was truly the stuff of nightmares to work through. I almost posted to our class discussion page that the link we were provided must not be right since I couldn’t advance past the home page. Clicking anywhere that made any logical sense to advance wasn’t the answer, so I just blindly moved the mouse around clicking and after a few tries I moved on. I was careful to not use my real information at first while filling out various questions, but that proved to be too challenging. With all of the pop-ups altering me that I was taking too much time, I became anxious, gave in, and put in everything I would never normally reveal to a company. This was a very good phycological trick to persuade me to answer honestly.

What really made this game so awful was that all the bad design elements I encountered are things I’ve experience before on the web, just never all at once. Reality is scarier than anything that could be dreamed up.