Task #10
Attention Economy
This week's task was to familiarize ourselves with practices that web and interaction designers use to lead the people's attention towards or away from certain elements in digital environments and to promote or discourage certain kinds of behaviours.
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For this task, we were asked to work our way through and online game User Inyerface and look for the ways in which it is designed to manipulate our attention and responses.s.
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Try the game first, then...
So, here are my results
Whew!
Writing this on my phone…after I threw my laptop out the window.
Just kidding, but I did have to walk away several times during the last few days.
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Truth be told this screencap is the last of several during the week.
Initially, I was kicked out several times by hitting the wrong button, then stalled at 12 min still not having passed the first screen. I resorted to trying to google hacks on how to complete the sign-up process. No luck. Finally got past the first screen and the last pages went well for a time of 8:36, but not really understanding how I had managed it.
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So…Proof positive that I am exactly as stubborn as I have been told….
This screen capture is how long it took me to go through the process and identify what the heck was tripping me up.
Yay! I am an "Interface Legend"
Legend - that is for how many attempts and the amount of time it took me to work my way through the game :-)
There were so many things tripping me up...
I really liked Brignull’s (2011) table of psychological insights of dark patterns to organize them all.
We don’t read pages. We scan them – Steve Krug
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I was skimming over things even on the second or third reading
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The best example was my attempt to change the keyboard to Russian to get a Cyrillic letter for my password. I finally realized it actually said ‘your password can have a Cyrillic letter …not that it must
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Note to all – it is hard to change your computer back to English when everything on the screen is in Russian!!!
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The drop-down cookies banner. Has the close button not only light and grayed out but made to look like a copywrite note. It says ‘close’ but I still read the word as copywrite several times.
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Filling out the domain – this is what held me up the longest. I entered a fake Gmail address, filling out gamail.com in the box. I just skimmed past the ‘other’ scroll on the right, .com is not ‘other’ it’s really common. Even when I scrolled through all the endings were less used endings. It took a couple of scrollings before I noticed ‘.com’ at the end of all the less popular endings.
People tend to stick to defaults – Jakob Nielsen
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The terms and conditions default is set to not accept, only missed that once.
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Then after a frustratingly slow scroll, where I didn’t read or even skim any of the terms (who knows what I agreed to) once you accept the Terms…. the default that actually refuses the terms becomes active again…
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and I missed it again for a while.
People will do things that they see other people are doing - Robert Cialdini
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Or in my case what we have gotten used to...
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Through our lives, we have become used to the idea that green means go and red means stop. Even before starting there is a big green button that I repeatedly clicked on to get going, even though the button said ‘no’ Then I continued to try and go by colour. The annoying timer has a green button that actually locks the screen, then to unlock it you have to use the red button. To add to that if I see just one more green button that is actually a ‘cancel’ button….
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Password requirements were all in green, even the ones that weren’t met, leading me to think my password was done and ready to go. The requirement ‘your password must have at least one capital letter was green even though I had no capital letters. I didn’t even read it, after all, it was green so no problem there.
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We are used to the biggest most obvious button as a go-ahead, moving forward, or next. Instead, it cancels everything. The small grayed out text which we have learned to see as inactive is actually the go-ahead. I really need to learn to read the big attractive button before I click it.
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We are used to seeing the next steps highlighted on the screen. The cookies banner across the top has a highly visible differently coloured button available, while the button that actually works is small and not highlighted and worded negatively ‘no not really’
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Image upload. The bold highlighted image button – I downloaded a useless PNG several times before noticing the small grayed out button that would actually upload an image.
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3 interests - I am so used to reading from the top right that I methodically worked through unchecking the automatic defaults only to have them come back. I took a while to ‘see’ the unselect all box in the bottom left corner. It’s in a spot we usually don't look for important information.
Reflections
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The most egregious of all were the ‘hurry up’ timer and the ‘how can we help box’ Completely designed to get in the way and increase stress levels.
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The ‘how can we help’ box was my nemesis. Even after the first time that I figured out that the top right button was not an X to close the screen, every time the box showed up I quickly hit the top right. Again pointing back to the fact that we do what we are used to/and see others doing.
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Interestingly in the nursing skills/sim lab we have students practice so that they develop what we call ‘muscle memory’ for repeated actions that we want to develop automaticity for, checking ABCs, safety checks, etc.
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Well, I have a well-developed ‘muscle memory’ for many items on internet forms, especially clicking on the top right corner.
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My next questions are how did our many cultures create a ‘standard’ for items on an online form? Who controls it? Is it the same all over the web? Or are their different pockets of culture that have it working differently? Can one large dominant culture use it to advantage over smaller less dominant cultures?
Now that I am a ‘True Interface Legend’ I may just have to take the reward that sends me to the Baggar Careers page and apply…
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Eva
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***apologies for extended ETEC 540 semi-rant, but I feel much better :-)
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Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design. Retrieved from https://alistapart.com/article/dark-patterns-deception-vs-honesty-in-ui-design/
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"London traffic lights - t2i" by @Doug88888 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0