Hostile Design Experiment

Running your worst interface on real people, then finding out if it actually did what you designed it to do

Due: 3 May 2027 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

Test your Worst Interface on real people, and find out whether it actually does what you built it to do.

Being annoying and being effective are different claims, and this is the assessment that finally forces them apart. Recruit 3–5 participants, give each the same task, and don’t tell them which parts were deliberately designed against them. Start with a specific question — does hiding the free option behind a second menu make people more likely to pick the paid one? — then watch, rather than ask, what actually happens: completion time, wrong choices, hesitation, confusion, whatever’s relevant to your interface.

What you submit#

A short report: the question you set out to answer, who you tested and how, what happened, and an honest comparison between what you predicted in Assessment 2 and what participants actually did. Somewhere around 800–1,000 words. A prediction that turns out wrong isn’t a bad result here — the report just has to show you can tell the difference between what you expected and what the evidence says.