We made a game that measures how much soul you lose during bad onboarding

Why Read This from an HCI Perspective

This article is a case where ‘bad onboarding’ is intentionally designed to provoke users’ rage-clicks. For HCI practitioners and researchers, however, it can serve as a useful diagnostic tool. By making usability issues visible through emotional reactions and interaction patterns, it offers a chance to think about how to measure and operationalize error recovery, frustration, and cognitive load. In particular, it lets you examine the pros and cons of evaluation methods that use fun as the medium.

CIT's Commentary

From a CIT perspective, this can be interpreted not as ‘malicious UX,’ but as an interactive prototype that reveals users’ frustration in an experiential way. Onboarding isn’t just a first-screen walkthrough—it’s a process that simultaneously shapes expectations, creates a sense of control, and enables learning. This piece shows the opposite in an extreme form, prompting the question of when friction becomes play and when it turns into drop-off. That said, using rage-click as a real-time metric is engaging, but in real product contexts it risks reducing an emotional state to a single behavior. Therefore, such a device seems better suited to exploratory research or empathy workshops within a team than to purely quantitative measurement.

Questions to Consider While Reading

• Q.In this interaction, at what points and under what conditions does user frustration get amplified the most?
• Q.What kinds of distortions can occur when behavioral signals like rage-click are used as proxy indicators of emotional state?
• Q.How could this kind of ‘reversal-style’ prototype be used to evaluate onboarding quality in real services while still keeping the experience fun?