Task: Get familiar with some of the several practices that web and interaction designers employ to lead the attention of people towards or away from certain elements in digital environments, and to promote or discourage certain kinds of behaviours.
These practices, coined as dark patterns by Brignull (2010) are represented in the online game User Inyerface by the Belgium interaction design studio Bagaar.
For this task, work your way through the game by clicking the link above. While you do, notice the ways in which the GUI is designed to manipulate your attention and responses, you will use this information as a prompt for your reflection on this task.
This task will be considered complete when you get to the end of the game and post a screenshot of the final screen in your webspace, along with your reflection. If you fail to reach the end of the task, don't worry, just add the reasons behind this in your reflection.
I found this task really interesting because I would argue that although this website does a good job of showcasing “bad” UX design, I actually see a lot of it as very dated. I think this kind of blatantly “dark” UX is rarely seen online these days except in places like porn websites because your average consumer won’t put up with it. If facebook had adds that pop up, or misleadingly coloured buttons, people would get too frustrated and stop using it.
In his TedTalk Tristan Harris talked about the attention economy and how algorithms and developers are doing their best to keep people engaged on their websites for as long as possible(Harris, 2017). Many (though not all!) of the dark UX tactics that Inyerface uses are outdated. Now, companies invest heavily on “improving” user experience. Websites are expected to “just work” without the user having to learn how to use them, because if a website is too hard or inconvenient to use, people will turn to the vastness of the internet to find something that does.
I made it through the Inyerface site in 6 minutes and 28 seconds, which I thought was pretty good, considering the constant roadblocks it threw in my face. One thing that helped was for me to essentially ignore the popups as much as possible. Once I figured out how to close them haha. I think popups like that, especially ones with timers, are rarely seen on the current day internet, they scream “scam site” and most people would be turned off by that very quickly.
Present day, we see much more subtle manipulations than what Inyerface offers. Evan Puschak describes in his video for deceptive.design how Amazon.com makes it nearly impossible for users to delete their account by hiding it under layers and layers of non-intuitive “page organization”(Puschak, 2018). Or how companies will send emails where the unsubscribe button has purposely been made the same colour as the rest of the surrounding text. Another more modern dark UX is that users don’t want to read pages, they want to scan them (Birgnull, 2011). So companies have no problem hiding information in plain sight, and then blaming consumers/users for not reading it.
I love that Inyerface made these things so in your face, in fact, I plan on using this with my grade 8 students when we talk about online literacy. But I think the real risk is that marketers have come a long way past such blatant, in your face tactics. The scariest part of this dovetails with Zeynep Tufekci’s TedTalk about how easily humans are manipulated, not only by algorithms, but by simple psychology. (Tufekci, 2017). As Brignull (2011) says, “our best defense against the dark patterns is to be aware of them, and shame the companies that use them.” I’m looking forward to creating a unit plan around the content from this week to help my middle school students navigate the internet with a better understanding of the ways in which their attention is being hijacked.
References
Brignull, H. (2011). Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design. Interaction Design, Usability, 338.
Harris, T. (2017). Tristan Harris: How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day | TED Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_how_a_handful_of_tech_companies_control_billions_of_minds_every_day
Puschak, E. (2018). Deceptive Design – formerly darkpatterns.org. https://www.deceptive.design/
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Zeynep Tufekci: We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | TED Talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads
Comments