On Seven Digital Deadly Sins. The prompt is:

How is user interaction designed to organize the content of the site? How does the interaction make the user a part of the experience (what role do they have)?

What might be another way to organize the content?

In fact, I was quite a bit annoyed by how tardy the transitions are in 7 Digital Deadly Sins—maybe my sin there is called "Haste."

Anyhow, the reiteration of classic themes in different eras is such a handy framework to reflect our understanding of (an aspect of) the time. While I'm not a religious person who has enough knowledge to interpret whether 7 Digital Deadly Sins has faithfully captured the original meaning of those seven deadly sins, I would imagine if there was a religion that originated from a digital world, it could be the case that they really consider those 7 digital deadly sins as serious as human religion used to do.

That said, the point I'd like to make here is related to the role a user will be entitled to when experiencing the interaction. The interaction was fine in the main catalog, after the trailer and before delving into one of the seven specific sins—the belt layout, parallax panning, highlights of connected panels, etc. At this moment, the user is still a "user," a mere viewer.

What triggered me, though, was how a user was "invited" or "transformed" into more than a "mere user"—into a "judge," a "priest," or so on. There is nothing wrong with inviting the user into the storytelling and allowing them to share a role in the play—it is for sure an effective way of improving interactivity and deepening engagement; not to mention I myself tend to presume or design roles for the user/viewer when it comes to my project. However, in some cases, maybe it is not very appropriate to assign specific roles to our users. And 7 Digital Deadly Sins is a case in point, from my perspective.

Maybe I wouldn't have been triggered by that if I were living in the world one or two decades ago—the world was much more insensitive back then, I guess. On the other hand, it was really hard for me, as a user, not to think of "why I am entitled to judge whether this should be absolved or condemned," especially when each "sin" is demonstrated with the interview with a particular individual.

If we must assign the user a role or something in the seven deadly sins context, my choice may be a therapist sitting in the other side of a confession booth—no judge, that is. Therefore, when this philosophy was applied to the overall presentation of the seven sins, I may shift a bit away from mainly using the  interview (and articles) as the media, but rather build up some embedded mock-up cases (for example, of "syndromes" when using those trending platforms) to "show not tell."

At the end of the day, I understand that there mustn't have been any bad intention behind those absolve/condemn questions when they were designed; most people may not take it so seriously as I'm trying to do now; and I myself was in fact nonetheless enjoying the content other than that (despite the slow animations I had to wait for). Still, I do believe it is a fine reminder for us when it comes to designing our own interaction/storytelling—be aware.