Homework-1

mohamedabdulgafoor
Oct 8, 2020
7 min read

Updated: Nov 2, 2020

Lecture1: Affordances.

A piano is a good example for good affordance. I explain here how nicely the black and white keys of piano are designed to match the size of the fingers.

"An affordance is a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used."

- Don Norman

Figure: Kids piano is a good example for good affordance

The piano above is especially designed for kids to play. The width and the length of each white keys more or less matching the size of the age group. Moreover, the button are well designed with an appropriate size & width so that one can easily press. By looking at the keys and buttons, it is very clear that keys/buttons must be pressed, no any other operation is feasible here. Power button has possible ON/OFF, written next to it. So the user knows how to use it without going through the manual.

Bad Affordance

A good example for a bad affordance is the Interactif SMART Board (SB660 ??) that I use in my teaching. It has four pens (black, red, green & blue) and all of them must be kept in its allocated space (Pens tray). We can pick our color of choice if we want to write on it. In case, if we mistakenly keep the red pen in the location of the black and vice versa and write on the board, we will see the opposite color that we do not intend to choose. Meaning, for example if we pick a red pen to write, it will show the black color and vice versa (because we kept in a wrong location).

In addition to that, there is a sponge to wipe the writings, which is bulky and if we lose it we will have a hard time to erase things on the board. The designer might have in mind to design it with a physical white board, i.e. to have mostly used colors in teaching, sponge etc. However, this is a poorly designed smart board for teaching.

How to fix this?

Well we dont need four pens and eraser to interact with this smart board. Here the purpose is to write on the board, hence one pen is enough. This smart board works with resistive technology, meaning, it is a touch-sensitive computer screen that contains two flexible sheets coated with a resistive material and separated by an air gap or microdots (ref: 5). If we press the smart board with a pen or finger, a contact point is established and the corresponding the coordinate location on the computer can be seen.

A careful software design is enough to fix this multi pen, multi pen-tray problems. With only one pen, the user should be able to pick the different color of choice, if we could redesign it in the software level.

Lecture2: Gestalt Laws

Gestalt principles describe how the human eye perceives visual elements. The law describes how we perceive similar elements from a complex arrangement and able to recognize patterns.

I explain here two application of Gestalt laws that went wrong and how to correct it.

The following poster breaks the Gestalt laws.

It breaks the law of similarity. For example, in Mitchell-Soto-Talamo, there is no reason why the first letter must be red. It breaks the similarity. Similarly in Dinner & Comedy Show, Professional Comedy Show etc. It appears "M, D" , "S, C", "T, S" are group by red color. No evidence of Symmetry. May be the highlighted red, blue and white trying to convey the message of American flag, but most people wont be able to get that message. In the first raw Patriotic Comedy under blue background convey nothing. Instead it appears to form a seperate group. To fix it, we can make all letters are with the same color, for example, Mitchell-Soto-Talamo. Remove blue background from Patriotic Comedy.

2. The following poster breaks the Gestalt laws.

This poster appears to be confusing as someone can group the blue words together. Such as "THE ABOUT IS THAT" or "THING TASTE". The word "GOOD" in the white look like it is breaking the continuity of of the arrangement of words. Moreover, the last two lines are in red and it appears it is part of the background or difficult to tell the what is letter and what is background. It breaks the law of proximity. To fix it, one can chose a one color, such as white or blue for the quotes and may be a different color to indicate the name of the person who said this quote.

References:

1. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/gestalt-principles

Lecture3: Dark Design Patterns

Dark Design Patterns is a phenomena in which values of users are undermined in favor of shareholder values. Designers and developers use this phenomena to exploit human psychology in order to increase/decrease/manipulate certain behaviors that are not in fact in favor of the end-users. Remember the Dark Design Patterns are not a simple error in design or an unintentional mistake. But they are accurately prepared with a deep understanding of human psychology with zero user's interest in mind.

It is imperative to discuss these practices in the HCI community to avoid the danger of manipulative/illicit design practices and to increase the awareness of ethical and moral issues associated with these practices.

In this section we will discuss two main Dark Design Patterns and will elaborate more into that in order to re-design or avoid such end-user manipulation.

Forced Action

1. Windows 10: Forced Update

When there is an update in the Windows 10 Operating System (OS), the user can not shut down or restart his/her machine with performing the required update. The below picture shows the Forced Action by the Windows 10.

Figure: Example of forced action on Windows 10 (ref: 3,4).

This dark design pushes its users to perform an action to complete a very basic functionality. Shutting down or re-starting the OS is considered to be an important step when using a machine. But the designers of the Windows 10 OS, systematically exploited these features in order to forcefully update the system without a desire/request of the end-users.

In the general context, forcing someone to do a task is illegal, unless that violates another person's fundamental rights. We can find many examples in which governments apply certain law and orders and if a person violates it, a cop may force the person to perform the required task. A good example is wearing a mask in the time of COVID19. If a person does not wear it, a cop may say/force to wear it because it will harm other people's health and well-being. But in the case of Windows 10, it is illegal to force the end-users to get the update against their will.

So how can we redesign this illicit design practice?

Well from the perspective of Microsoft, it may have an obligation to protect its end-users from the malwares and virus. We can see an increased amount of cyber attack against the Window machines worldwide. For example, attacks like "WannaCry ransomware attacks" were specifically targeted for Windows users. Hence, we need to find a neutral ground to tackle this issue. Instead of forcing the end-users, we can redesign the OS in such a way to show an option next to the restart or shut down button and the level of importance of the update. The Importance of the update can be assigned with colors to the text/icon. For example, RED: Indicates a security update (immediate update required) ORANGE: Indicates a feature/performance enhanced update. But at the end the user SHOULD have the rights to UPDATE or NOT.

Figure: A typical color coding to over the Windows 10 OS dark pattern design.

2. Privacy Zuckering

Privacy Zuckering is a phenomena in which the end-user is tricked into publicly sharing more and more private information about themselves than they really meant to. Have you ever been in a position to fill some extra information (irrelevant) on your Facebook? or in any other applications? if so, you’ve been Zuckered!!

In Privacy Zuckering, the end-user private data is subjected to sell to any third parties to make profit, which includes in the Terms and Conditions of the App or Website but most of the end-users do not read it thoroughly before they agree. Facebook had a bad reputation of privacy control settings in its early days. After many condemnations and tremendous criticism by consumers and privacy groups, FB came up with an easier privacy settings area. Even now-a-days privacy Zuckering occurs behind the scene.

We can see in this example, the messenger app is trying to get the phone-book information about the user. This trick will help the messenger app to associate the contents of the phone-book to its database and find similar interest of his/her friends which helps to send more advertisement, hence to increase the revenue of the company. Like in the previous example (Forced Action), here as well we can see there is no way to cancel this. If a person clicks OK without realizing the illicit purpose behind the scene, s/he will sell their own privacy information to the firm. We can see in this case, the FB sneakily obtaining the user data, which is known as "Privacy Zuckering".

Figure credit to Glen Carrie on unsplash.

Cambridge Analytica scandal

In 2018 a company known as Cambridge Analytica was in hot water for harvesting personal information of millions of FB users without their consent for political interests. These kinds of illicit practices by the tech companies pave the way to increase the awareness of the importance of privacy among advocacy groups and governments.

So how can we redesign this illicit design practice?

Transparency is the key. But how can we make sure the tech companies are open with the information that collects from its end-users? We must have a regulatory body that constantly review the UX and company terms & conditions in order to avoid illicit intentions. For an ordinary user, it is a difficult task to go through in detail all the terms & conditions. But a governmental/ regulatory body can make sure these companies are strict regulation. When it comes to re-design, the user must have an option to cancel it if they don't want to synchronize the contacts.

References

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