This week’s assignment was another good opportunity to learn the ropes on planning and conducting usability testing. Every time we get the chance to work on drafting documents, I can feel myself becoming better and more confident at the practice. Being able to assemble attractive and informative documents such as these is an invaluable skill set for any designer to have.
“Dark patterns” was an interesting industry term to learn this week. Everyone with experience clicking around the internet has been tricked into clicking an advertisement they didn’t mean to, or a misleading button. Sometimes these unethical ads are designed to actually move to make the user more likely to click them. Other times they’re outright misleading, such as a “Download Here” button (or several) that don’t actually offer the user the software they thought they were getting. In any case, it is useful to have a term to describe these practices, and interesting to read about some of the less ethical approaches to UXD.
ralphux 