The User Inyerface experience really exemplified the manipulative technological design tricks that Tristan Harris (2017) talks about in his TED talk. It was interesting as I clicked through the interface before watching the ted talks and going through the readings – the whole time I felt a wild sense of anxiety and frustrations. Harris reminds us, “the best way to get people’s attention is to know how someone’s mind works” (2017). The interface shows us it knows too well and uses all the techniques to induce frustrations. The parts below really got to me:
-Counterintuitive buttons (button signs that were not buttons, nothing direct to click on to exit a tab)
-Time pressure with the count up?
-Time pressure with warnings on time’s running out! Even if it wasn’t
-CAPTCHA’s instructions
By making simple actions like the CAPTCHA instructions unnecessarily complicated, the design forced me to have repeated errors. In this way, I had to stay engaged with the technology, even I as felt more and more frustrated. This echoes Tufekci’s (2017) argument that technology, “doesn’t just get you to click, it predicts your vulnerabilities”. The Inyerface designer knew that I would just starting clicking the CAPTCHA images without looking scrolling up to see further boxes up top, manipulating me to make that mistake. These frustrating design choices really made me reflect on how easy phone navigation has become. The fact that I can spend hours on my phone with such ease reflects the power these companies have gained by ‘hacking’ human psychology. Even the ease now I feel with online work – duplicate buttons, citations buttons – all clearly designed to have us coming back to these technologies. These seemingly trivial and benign choices by design teams have manipulatived our behaviours, and an entire generation.
Harris, T. (2017, April). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day [Video]. TED Conferences.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [Video]. TED.