Build a Button Worth Pressing

Move from analysing someone else's button to building and testing your own.

Due: 23 April 2027 · Weight: 35%

The Button Autopsy took someone else’s button apart. This assessment asks you to build one that survives the same kind of scrutiny — including from you, once you’ve tested it on someone else.

The brief#

Design and build one working digital button.

It must deliberately address:

• pressability and signifiers, from Week 3, The Grammar of Pressable
• the relationship between consequence and feedback, from Week 4, What the Button Promises
• feedback timing, from Week 5, Feedback and the Length of a Second
• repeat pressing or reward, where relevant, from Week 6, The Button That Wants You Back
• at least one tested point where the same control fails under a changed use condition, from Week 9, One Button, Many Hands

Not every button needs every property at equal weight — one with no meaningful repeat-press behaviour doesn’t need to invent one for Week 6’s sake — but each item above should be visibly answered somewhere in what you submit, not left implicit.

What you submit#

The working button. A record of testing it with another person: what you asked them to do, what happened, and where the changed-condition test broke it. A short rationale — a page, not a report — that argues for your decisions using the course’s vocabulary, not generic design language like “intuitive” or “user-friendly.”

Marking#

Weighted, across the button’s own construction, the quality and honesty of your testing evidence, and whether the rationale argues from the course rather than restating it.