Over on UX Collective, I recently wrote about something deceptively mundane: the rage click.
You know the move — that frantic, repeated tapping on a button or link that just won’t do what it promised to. It might seem like a small moment, a minor user error, a frustration spike. But when you zoom in, rage clicks reveal something deeper — a moment when the interface breaks its promise, and the user momentarily loses their grip on control, meaning, and trust.
I call them microdoses of pure horror. They expose the uncanny, the manipulative, and sometimes the downright broken assumptions coded into our digital environments. They’re a symptom, but also a signal — pointing to hidden power dynamics, broken affordances, and the darker corners of our attention economies.
It’s not just about better UX. It’s about reckoning with what our interfaces do to us when they stop working — or work too well in the wrong direction.
Read the full piece here:
📎 Rage clicks are microdoses of pure horror
