I have encountered the User Inyerface website before, so I was already familiar with it and didn’t take long to complete it. The first time I did it, it took me much longer, and this points to the heart of what makes this game challenging – it subverts user expectations and exploits prior experience. 

User Inyerface makes use of typical design elements that appear on websites, like text fields, hyperlinks, and checkboxes, but interacting with them does not produce the behaviour the user expects. For instance, text boxes have descriptive grey text that would normally disappear when clicked on, but in this case it is actual text that needs to be removed by the user. This subversion can confuse the user, preventing them from proceeding to the next page.

The site also makes use of deceptive practices like double negatives, as in the terms and conditions checkbox. This is similar to the dark patterns described by Tufekci (2017), but there is a fundamental difference. Dark patterns are subversions of expected outcomes that trick the user into performing an action they do not understand. To be effective, dark patterns should guide the user toward a goal that benefits the designer while making the user think they are achieving a different goal. In that sense, User Inyerface is not a dark pattern because the design is intended to frustrate the user and prevent them from achieving their goal (completing the game). It is simply a subversive design.

While completing the game, I was reminded of the book Sustainable Design by Issa and Isaias (2015). The authors explain how the pinnacle of effective design should anticipate the goals of the user and allow them to effortlessly achieve those goals with few barriers. User Inyerface does the opposite of that, obscuring hyperlinks or making tasks like selecting the user’s age tedious, to emphasize the design functions that literate internet users may take for granted. 

Many users would struggle to complete User Inyerface due to its deceptive design. However, the prior experience of the user plays heavily into that deception. It’s likely that a younger user that’s less familiar with internet design conventions would have an advantage in completing the game over an older user since their expectations of interaction response would be different. If that’s the case, user analytics would allow the website designer to infer characteristics of the user based on which parts of User Inyerface they struggle with and which they do not. Ultimately, any design is created with an intended user and goal in mind, and the design guides the user toward that goal. Designers can thus influence user goals through design and infer characteristics of that user from interactions with the design.

References

Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015). Sustainable Design. Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4471-7513-1 

Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en