Helping out a mate set up her #gameDad recently. She got to a page asking a question and prodded the buttons without reading. I went "Wait hang on what did that say," we never found out but it was Probably something about updating a list of ports? Who knows! Anyway it started up fine, but... like, twenty years ago I would've gone, like, "Mate what are you doing," but these days...
When every website you visit thrusts a thing in your face as you're scrolling and you know it's spam so you just hit the heck-off button without looking, never mind reading
When every game you play starts with a bunch of logo videos that you have to mash buttons to skip
When a new game throws some bollocks up about an EULA that nobody expects anyone to ever read
When every three days your computer goes "Hey can I just -" and you read it once and understand that it's asking you to install spyware and then every other time you hit the Remind Me In 3 Days button without thinking or even pausing
When every day you get an email that says "Important information about your account" and it's never important information
When 80% of your physical mail goes straight into the recycling bin without even being opened because, well, it's just recycling
...yeah. It's absolutely no surprise that our default first interaction with a machine is to mash buttons randomly until it stops banging on about whatever and gets on with doing what we bought it to do.
She's not daft, my mate. UI designers just behave as though they live in a vacuum. They think that when someone looks at their menu, it's the first menu that user has ever seen, and they haven't seen a hundred menus a day with a massive button saying "Yeah make everything worse lol" and a tiny text link that says "Just let me get on with it for a minute."
This is the new normal, UI designers. Your users expect hot garbage, and they expect it so hard that they'll treat your Very Important Question the same way they'd treat any other spyware cookie crap that every website insists is a Very Important Question, and they'll just give whatever answer will let them continue while being mildly annoyed.
@ifixcoinops You're confusing UI designers with marketing ghouls and the bosses that force employees to add dark patterns to interfaces to extract an extra 0.00001% profit.
You're blaming the workers for what capitalism is doing.
@ifixcoinops I'm not sure what the person making that interface could've done though? Since from what I understand from your posts it looks like the user mashed through it despite it not using dark patterns?
Back in 1999 when you'd go to join a new forum there'd be a rules page, and at the bottom would be a big bright eye-catching "AGREE AND CONTINUE" button, and a little way above it, in the rules themselves, would be something like "To prove that you've read the rules, click on the period at the end of this sentence."
Clicking on "AGREE AND CONTINUE" would issue a two hour IP ban so you could Actually Read The Rules, and also think about what you'd done.
@ifixcoinops it's been going this way for years — like a solid decade ago someone I worked with asked me to add a "calibrate the lights" reminder when an app started up, then months later asked me why the lights weren't calibrating, so I sat with them while they went through the process and the first thing they did was open the app and dismiss the reminder they had asked for workout reading it. I asked why and they said "oh, that always appears" 🙃
At work now people keep asking to add modal popups to say "hey look at this new feature" but I've seen all of those same people click through the same thing in other apps without reading them. Important information should go in a notification feed or something where users can read it on their own terms. If you make something an obstruction to a user doing what they're trying to do then of course they won't engage with it, they'll just try to clear it as fast as they can to get on with their actual objective
@ifixcoinops The other day I was at a self checkout and some pop-up about "20% OFF" showed up and I mashed the "ok" button and it said "Waiting for attendant...". She came over and was like "oh yeah idk why it does that every time, try again" and reset the interface. The next time, I read the pop-up closely, and realized it was an ad to sign up for the store credit card. This lady had been summoned to "teach me more" about the credit card on every single transaction and neither party knew why
@janeadams@ifixcoinops Best to smash the terminal if that happens as it has obviously been compromised. It is your duty as a citizen to protect others from harm.
@ifixcoinops I have that problem on my website. There's one thing you can do and maybe 1/3-1/2 of users assume it'll do something it doesn't say it will do. I added a large message saying THIS DOESN'T DO WHAT MANY PEOPLE ASSUME, IT ONLY DOES [what it actually does] but people don't read that
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