Can't Unsee: Select the design that is most correct | Hacker News Reader

Can't Unsee: Select the design that is most correct

cantunsee.space

69 pointsabkumar20 comments

That's a bit biased. "Easy 2/18" insists that "Invite friends..." is the default button and should be blue, while "Skip" button should be white which makes look like it's not a button at all, so a user does not realize that he can skip the useless spamming "Invite" step. I think it's a bad design.

Yeah, that one was blatantly biased. It is a dark pattern trying to dissuade user from clicking that button - which honestly is just a bad design.

Some of them are genuenly good - the alignment ones for example, but others are open to interpretation where you have to pick the most 'in' option.

Yes, mostly they are fun. For some of the exercises I couldn't tell what is wrong but somehow one option looked better than the other.

Dark patterns are still patterns!

They key is consistency. Please leave your morals at the door.

The tutorial simply says to pick the one that's "more correct". There's nothing that indicates consistency should be valued more highly than ethics -- or any other possible ordering of design priorities.

I have been a designer for 10+ years, when you ask me “which is more correct” I’d always go for the option where skip is also a blue button.

Good design is not just consistent patterns, but also clear communications. This is the design equivalent of fraudulent small print in a contract. This is saying to the user: you have two options, but one is rather silly, don’t go for it.

In that regard: weighting and sorting options by how often they are used is good design (because it reduces the communicative friction in everyday life).

Making the (from a privacy standpoint) better option seem like no real alternative option is increasing the friction for some and manipulating others into not choosing at all. Like a car that warns you about steering right while it praises you for steering left, although both should be equal options.

Bad design, because it is bad communication.

Yes. Again all true. But as a product designer your job is usually to make the product in the most cost efficient way for the company, not the user. So implementing design in a way that is also part of the product strategy is good design!

The same way IKEA stores are designed to keep you furthest away from the exits. Designing that in a good way is much harder than simply designing a system where the user has to make educated guesses.

The thing that is wrong in the design in having two calls to action. The fact that it's user hostile is a separate issue. You could make the skip button look more like a button but you should still deemphasize all but one action.

Evil design is bad design.

There are some of the "broken" designs (like corner radius or capitalization) that amount to design choices and not necessarily constitute a good or bad design by themselves. Also, most of the examples seem to be taken from Skype. And why should we log in at the end, what do I get if I login?

Ive done all 3 series. To me, some of them are quite blatant, especially in the easy series. Some of them are irrelevant to me, especially in hard. In a few cases, I actually prefer the bad design.

My main takeaway is that design has quickly diminishing returns. Which is probably not what the authors wanted.

I've been doing UI/UX for a long time. I scored about 6700.

Some of the stuff is objectively bad, but once you get into the hard territory... does it really matter if your users or even other designers can't perceive it after a couple of seconds?

I'm all for consistency in design, but considering how those extreme levels of UI _nitpickingness_ don't really affect the UX, I'd say this falls into overdesign.

UX is much more important than UI.

This is kind of neat. Thoughts:

I can only toggle between them in-place after I've made a selection. It would be nice to be able to be able to compare them like this before I choose.

It also wasn't clear to me if by "correct" I was supposed to pick the one that I found most familiar, or the one I thought was better. Then eventually I figured out that this was a game, and there was a predetermined "right" and "wrong" answer for all of these.

What would be really cool is a service where people making a design could upload two possible samples, and you could have 100 users quickly select which one they thought was better. No comments, no analysis, no thinking. Just A or B, two possible views of the same data, and you click which you think is right.

Regarding your first point, I think that would make it too easy. Part of the challenge is figuring out what the differences are.

I love your second idea though! Someone should make this if it doesn't already exist. Although if it's not gamified, what's the incentive for people voting between two designs?

I might be mistaken about this, but a lot of the ones where it says that the letter kerning is wrong, looks to me like it’s the letter spacing that is wrong.

Kerning being a specific adjustment between two letters and letter spacing being the general distance between the letters.

Nevertheless a fun little quiz, but I think it needs some improvement to not be so full of essentially arbitrary design decisions. Also, to not promote dark patterns.

Designers tend to love buttons with rounded corners, but users don't care if buttons (or text input boxes) are rounded or squared, or if the magnifying glass icon in the search box is 5% bigger than the text.

Is there a standard to horizontal separator thickness? Oh, the separator didn't go the extra 20 pixels over to the edge? Whatever, the separator is there and doing its job, and it made its point.

Fun, but: I can't unsee that it says "Press and hold COMPARE or SHIFT to compare, ENTER to continue.", but while there is a "Compare"-button, there is no "Enter" button, only a "Next" (yes, I know the RETURN-key works, but still)

X "Inconsistent labels"

I scored 7030 and had PTSD flashbacks to the time I worked with a 40-year veteran graphic designer. You wouldn't want to run designs by that person on a Monday, ever. Overall though I thought it was a neat little game. Thanks for posting it.

This is fun but broken, on mobile safari it’s mixing up the images and giving me the same pair from the previous question.

Can one improve at this kind of skill? This is a serious question.

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