Week 9 Session: Human Guinea Pigs

Testing whether your week-5 interface actually produces the frustration you designed it to. Hostile Design Experiment due this week

3 May 2027

Before the session#

Have your Worst Interface ready to hand to someone else, and a plan for what you’ll measure: completion time, errors, abandonment, confusion, success rate, clicks, perceived difficulty.

In the session#

Human Guinea Pigs: you test your own bad design on a classmate who hasn’t been told what’s being measured, and you watch in silence. Being annoying and being effective are not the same claim — the entire point of this exercise is finding out whether your interface produces the behaviour you predicted, or whether people are more resourceful, more stubborn, or more oblivious than your design accounted for.

Afterwards#

The Hostile Design Experiment is due today. Designing something badly in theory turns out not to guarantee the experience you imagined — which is exactly what week 10 asks you to reckon with.