The Worst Interface

A working interface you make deliberately worse on purpose, with the receipts for exactly why

Due: 29 March 2027 · Weight: 25%

The brief#

Take a simple, ordinary interaction and redesign it to be worse, on purpose, without breaking it.

Checkout, sign-up, booking, a subscription, a settings page, a survey, a login, a cancellation — pick something ordinary enough that everyone already knows how it’s supposed to work. Then decide, before you touch anything, exactly one behaviour you want to produce: users picking the pricier option by accident, or cancelling taking five times longer than subscribing did. Every change afterwards should serve that one goal — poor hierarchy, a misleading default, an extra step, wording that’s technically true and practically confusing. None of it counts if the interface stops working; deleting the submit button isn’t design, it’s damage.

What you submit#

A working prototype of your redesign, the original (or a neutral baseline) so a marker can see exactly what changed, and 600–800 words explaining your target behaviour, what you changed, why you expect each change to work, and which course concepts you’re leaning on. Testing it properly comes next assessment — for now, the argument just has to be plausible.