Attention Economy
Attention economy is not a new concept and it is not solely an online phenomena. Remember those summer days when you went to a grocery store to enjoy the air-conditioning and ended up buying two bags of snack? For those who are budget-conscious, they will tell you the importance of having a shopping list ready so you minimize the actual time spent in the stores.
My Inyerface Experience
Oh the frustration! I tried User Inyerface for 3 times and I couldn’t get through the first page (is there even a 2nd webpage to this?). This is design is worse than the websites back to GeoCities time. I got frustrated and distracted by all the stimuli presented on the same page. Eventually I watched a YouTube video on how to get through this, after hearing confirmation from Ernesto and fellow classmates that there is indeed an end page to this. I was able to capture some screenshots in different attempts and I am going to share them below.
Where should I click?
It took me awhile before I know how to get to the next page. Many of the visual cues are used, including underlining text, different colour, and capitalization but it was only when I randomly clicked on somewhere between click and HERE that got me to the first page.
Tick tock – The Pressure!
Also frustrating is a window would pop up to tell you that time is ticking when you frantically trying to fill out the information. When you click “Lock”, it does not actually stop the time and it took me a few try to realize that if I click the lower left hand corner, I can resume my original task.
Thank you for nothing – Unhelpful helping desk
Out of curiosity, I clicked on the help box and this was what I saw. Not to mention how ridiculous that there are 419 people in line, when I click on the blue ^ sign, instead of making the help box to a bigger/full screen, the box only got longer.
This box is a true demonstration of what Zeynep Tufekci talked about in the video and that is outrage is one of the most effective emotions to get our attention.
Design Fault by default
After quickly looked up some YouTube tutorial, I finally got to the second page. However, as you can see, the default is that all options under interests were selected already. The trick is to unclick the last box of all 3 rows in order to clear ALL boxes.
Imagining the frustration of uncheck all boxes while another reminder popped up on the screen!
Perfect Verification Process – not
Two major design flaw on this page. The first one was the scroll bar was set to the middle so at first glance, the boxes do not match to their corresponding image. One has to manually scroll up in order to find the boxes that locate on top of the 4 images.
The second flaw is its verification process and it cracked me up the first time when it asked me to select all pictures with glasses. Where is the logic?!
Carlton dance
Finally made it and never in my life did I feel so happy to see Carlton!
Reflection
The whole experience was like walking into a maze and get trapped inside. Reading more about dark patterns, it is fascinating and scary to see how our minds can be manipulated easily. The persuasion is not necessarily about purchasing services or good and sometimes there are political agenda behind.
Reference:
Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en (Links to an external site.)