Can't Unsee

I like how it trains you in noticing issues in alignment, spacing, font setting etc. But as others noted it mixes clear mistakes with highly subjective opinions around size, shape and color choices and even dark patterns while suggesting to use this test to filter out job candidates for design positions [0].

While there might be some merit to this method for educational purposes I'm generally wary of fully automated assessments as they often include hidden biases like in this case and just end up enabling you to hire the same kind of people all the time (which admittedly already is an issue with human assessments/interviews, so lets not make it worse).

[0] https://cantunsee.space/business

The "activity indicator color" one is "wrong" to me. It says "2h" by her name, meaning she was last online 2h ago, meaning that her activity indicator color should not still be green. Already feeling like some of these are one person's opinion, biased towards the current status quo in mobile/web. Although there are a lot of good points around padding, font, contrast, etc. Main theme seems to be around consistency.

Edit: Okay, well, I got

  7580
  Rank: PLATINUM (top 5%)
  Completed in 00:24:47

I think a lot of this was more "find the difference" than it was "tell me what version is better". Once you are able to find the subtle difference, it's pretty obvious which one is better, mostly because one of them lacks self-consistency. I think a lot of the tracking, color, and tint differences were pretty opinionated.

That's pretty interesting but also highly opinionated in places.

One card that was weird for me in particular was reinforcing dark UI patterns by considering a strongly bold backed "Invite Friends" above a "Skip" lacking any background as "More correct".

I enjoyed this. About 1/3 through “hard” difficulty, I found it difficult to discern differences. Perhaps I rely too heavily on my browser’s Inspector tool.

A quibble: I signed up for the “no spam” email update(s) and only then saw mention of Facebook via their HQ’s address. If this feeds into Facebook in any way, it’d be nice to know this prior to submitting my email. I do appreciate you have to verify your subscription via email verification, but the list still received my (unverified) email.

Edit: I see the creator is an employee at FB, hence their use of their hQ’s address, but the creator may want to consider another, like a PO Box. I am significantly less likely to confirm my email subscription if it has anything to do with Facebook.

Many of these are purely subjective. A 2pt line separator is not more "correct" than a 0.5pt one. Rounded box corners are not more "correct" than square ones. We are just trying to guess the author's own design preference.

I did enjoy the parts which were clearly about identifying errors or inconsistencies in design.

The question really should be renamed from "Select the design that is most correct" to "Select the design that is most adherent to the doctrines of the cult of Apple and Helvetica."

Omg this is from "For Business" section of the page:

"Use Can't Unsee to measure attention to detail

Our data suggests that high scores in the Can't Unsee game are correlated with high attention to detail.

You can use Can't Unsee to screen designers, developers, QAs, product managers and other people who job with technology.

This is how it works: after joining our program you'll get a custom link. Share this link with your candidates, and you'll see their results in a dashboard (custom integrations available)."

What kind of writing style is that, this is spying on people. If you're assesing someone, they should be aware of the fact.

I stopped playing at the "skip" dark pattern.

"Correct" is used subjectively here, which is awful since the word has a connotation of objectiveness. It's "correct" if your intend is to trick somebody into not clicking "skip". It's incorrect if the intend is to show to equally valid options to go forward.

Is this a test for "is the consistent with iOS"? I can spot all the differences (edit: hmn, not all of them, especially on Hard), but some of them are just worse.

Who thinks "2h ago" should be as bright as the name? Who thinks that speech bubbles should have border-radius so big that it creates a circle?

I think you could improve this test by at the very least not saying "correct". There were many cases where I spotted the difference and disagreed.

Equally, there were cases where I simply guessed and got lucky or unlucky. You could make this test much better by making the user click near the difference. This both removes the subjectivity and makes it much less likely to simply guess.

This lists some dark patterns as good practice... like the almost invisible “skip” button below the “invite friends” one

Cool - but this quickly wanders into highly questionable subjectivity.

I'm not a designer but I found a few things to be a bit off on the "One last thing..." page:

- Title is not centred [1]

- Bullet points look like checkboxes which is misleading since you can only select one [1]

- List of roles is not sorted in any meaningful way [1]

- Words are unevenly spaced inside SHOW MY SCORE [2]

- SHOW MY SCORE is slightly off centre inside the button [2]

- Another small nitpick, choice of colours, or perhaps it is the shadow, of the title makes my eyes think the text is a bit blurry. See top in [1]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/pBdz8le.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/H1beWLY.png

All I kept thinking was "that is not a Gibson ES-275". The ES-275 body shape has only 1 cutaway. The photo looks more like a ES-335 with the 2 horns.

Basically a fun QA test. Even if you disagree with what's "correct", being able to notice and articulate why something is off is a valuable skill.

The only only subjective ones I disagreed with were about tracking. With one I preferred more spacing, and the other I preferred less.

People complaining about dark patterns with buttons are missing the point. More than one colored button is bad with all current design. Whether you disagree with the other option being plain text is besides the point.

The one I disagreed with a lot was "border-radius" (why not call it what it is, rounded corners)

A little bit can make things look more friendly sometimes but I think modern design overuses it by a ton

Dropped out when I got to "separator width" as a point of contention.

Honestly I thought this was going to be more like an eye-test where it A/B's the elements into increasing visual frame.

How am I supposed to focus on small mistakes when on every screen with the guitar, the image is not aligned with the text box below it?!?

https://imgur.com/DesCfwm

I treated this like a spelling test: how am I accustomed to seeing this in professionally produced material, and therefore which option would I choose to avoid a distracting sense of "not rightness" for a general audience?

By those rules, it was a fun and fair game. I really hated abandoning my streak to get my own work done. Well done to the creators on that aspect.

I can understand that like a spelling test it might be frustrating if you approached it from the perspective of "how should this be done if we are open to unfamiliar possibilities."

The amount of design-self-righteousness in this "test" is over the top. These decisions are not set in stone and should rightfully be subject to change. If we train designers to adhere to this "right" way we be stuck with an 2020 aesthetic. Also Dark Patterns.

> You can use Can't Unsee to screen designers, developers, QAs, product managers and other people who job with technology.

“Who job with technology”. Not sure what you’re trying to say exactly, but needs attention.

Additionally, the “compare” button on mobile is annoying because (at least on an iphone) try’s to highlight the text shortly after holding it down.

All in all, well executed. Immediately made me think “oh this so what designers look for / at” which is not something I’d ever really considered.

Well done.

It was interesting that I’d often look at the two - say I can’t see any difference - pick one and turn out I picked the right one and the difference was something major like capitalization or aspect ratio.

The fanboy mentality surrounding this site kind of rubs me the wrong way. Why is putting the "skip" option in a blue box marked wrong? Why are square boxes marked wrong? I get the feeling that the creator of the site thinks that if a website doesn't look like the iOS interface then it automatically looks bad.

I hope most people that are in charge of web design disagree with the premise surrounding this site. There shouldn't be a "correctly" or "incorrectly" designed site. It's like declaring Renoir is better than Monet. They are both amazing, and in the end there is no objective foundation to claim such a thing.

7680 (top 5%) in 8m 12s. I too agree that some questions are highly subjective, only made "correct" by platform standards or controversial goals. Also one question was particularly impossible to discern even after the reveal; I was playing the game through RDP (cause I'm on a laptop and I have more powerful desktop at home) and the compression made both images identical.

The first one I got was the avatar with an online indicator. It's meant to be green if you're online, sure, but the subtext clearly says 2h ago suggesting they're no longer online. So what does 2h ago mean if they are online?

I'd argue that one is wrong in both images, it's failing to communicate either their online status or what the "2h ago" means clearly.

I am not nearly as knowledgeable about this as many of you and I took my time through the test. It was interesting though parts were not challenging.

I was most disappointed though to find that the text in the button to "Show my score" that allows you to see how well you did seems to have an extra space between 'my' and 'score'.

Thanks for an interesting diversion.

In almost all of these, the use of and definition of “more correct” is troubling at best.

Apart from a few obvious errors most of this is entirely subjective and promoting that as what is “correct” is at best a lie, and at worst full on malicious as the case promoting the less obvious “SKIP” button dark pattern.

Interesting! At some point on harder levels I started forcing myself to select the example which looks worse to me and thus I started getting more of the questions “correctly”! I suppose some people find things beautiful that are slightly imperfect. Or in other words to be attractive an image must be “interesting” and slight “tension” does contribute to it (for me). Of course I am not speaking about gross problems like buttons having inconsistent spaces between them or different shapes. And still. That shorter line under the user card! Or that claustrophobically small padding around the “enable camera” button! How can those be “correct”?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why does it say some things are correct and others not?

Of the easy questions, I disagreed with the first: a search field with square corners is perfectly fine.

I apparently misunderstood the context of the fourth, a red or blue phone icon that apparently was intended to mean "hang up" ("Destructive action button color"), but that bit of context was not made clear, so I thought it would start a call and of course chose the blue one.

Then I quit. Obviously this test is incorrect and ill-conceived.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

Maybe it's just not displaying correctly for me, but the difference between the images for the last easy one (search border radius) is extremely difficult to see.

I thought this was good for teaching things to look for and attention to detail. If I did this sort of exercise more often it might help me pick up more mistakes. Some of the styling may have been subjective but I think the aim was consistency which is something you probably want regardless of platform or theme.

What a great and practical way to teach people to 1) avoid things that make bad design. 2) teach designers the small things that come together to form an elegant design. Brilliant idea.

If I as a user think one thing is better than the other, does it make it automatically the more correct one? Unless you design doesn’t serve the purpose of a product but for yourself to feel better when compared to other designers.

Horizontal spacing differences are much easier to spot than vertical, with the images side-by-side as they are; would be interesting to offer the images one atop the other and see what difference that makes to the result.

It took me the first 2-3 "questions" to figure out what was going on but super cool after that I especially liked how the differences were so subtle you had to really pay attention to the minute differences.

Later on it becomes very questionable and subjective. But still fun till then.

There is a typo in the 'For business' page-

> You can use Can't Unsee to screen designers, developers, QAs, product managers and other people _who job_ with technology.

At the end, signed up for the mailing list but their address indicates this is a project from within Facebook? Like a sneaky recruiting project?

How was I supposed to pass the “button caption tracking” test on mobile or anywhere

I guessed and got it right but thats what was being evaluated?

I use linux so it was hard to answer this properly. Most Linux Distros have weird UI philosophies. Well it does its job

Highly subjective given the prompts but a GREAT test for the design team or graphics personnel you hire

It seems that the examples are randomly clearer/blurrier, or I'm going blind.

Some differences are not quite clear.

But interesting idea anyway. Thanks for sharing this.

How correct is the color red? Is it more correct than the color blue?

I thought this was to help me identify fraudulent websites.

Great game! Protip: zoom in your browser (CMD + +/-)

It was fun at first, but I left on the first Mailchimp ad.

But what if I really wanted to type "Okay "?

Edit: wow, looks like HN itself trims excess padding. I had written "Okay\s\s\s\s\s\s"

I liked it! Quite fun, thanks :)!

Reminds me this one: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/kerning.png

Great idea.