design thinking

Anti-fragile UX

cognitions, design, design thinking, strategy

This is a repost of an idea I’ve dreamt of for nearly a decade (and leveraged to help improve design thinking and approaches, though not to the extent described below). Now, in this time of AI, global audiences, and awareness of accessibility, it seems this could be possible. (Please note: some links now go to the Wayback Machine capture of a site.)

Nobody wants a fragile user experience. The thoughts that come to mind when you imagine such a site are probably buggy, not very usable, difficult to navigate, limited compatibility, and most definitely not user-friendly.

Now imagine a robust web app. This site would work across most if not all browser and devices, “gracefully degrading” when necessary. It would be usable, useful, and user-friendly, fulfilling the promise of site for the user. Bugs would be a rare event.

After reading Nassim Taleb’s antifragility discussion on Edge’s World Question Center, I think we can do better. As Taleb envisions it, an antifragile system is one that is “beyond robustness,” one that not only withstands disorder and change, but loves those things. Taleb provides an example:

Just as a package sent by mail can bear a stamp “fragile”, “breakable” or “handle with care”, consider the exact opposite: a package that has stamped on it “please mishandle” or “please handle carelessly”. The contents of such package are not just unbreakable, impervious to shocks, but have something more than that, as they tend to benefit from shocks.

So let us coin the appellation “antifragile” for anything that, on average, …benefits from variability.

In this and following posts, I’m going to discuss what the characteristics of an anti-fragile web app might look like. These include (but are not necessarily limited to):

  • A self-refining interface. The more browsers, devices, and user preferences it’s exposed to, the better it can refine itself, and predict or suggest the ideal UI for a given user with a given browser or device.
  • Self-refining taxonomy. A content strategy that benefits from variety and size. I’m convinced that in the post-Google, post-UX, post-social media world, semantic information management in all forms will be the next big thing. (Note: by post-Google, post-UX, etc., I don’t mean a world existing without those things. Rather, I mean the world that has thoroughly incorporated these and similar game-changing concepts and is ready to grow from there.)
  • Simplicity of structure, allowing flexibility of response.
  • Loves change. Learns from being used for new and unexpected purposes, adapting the new ability or use to improve or expand existing features.
  • The broader and more varied the audience, the more information there is to develop targeted content and interfaces.

self-refining interface

What on earth is a self-refining interface? A self-refining interface is one that adjusts itself to user needs, either at an aggregate or individual level. Ideally it would do both.

Today we have a plethora of interfaces with which to browse the web. Notepads, smart phones, PDAs, laptops, televisions and more are used to present online information. There are even a few awkward-looking wristwatches receiving online updates, heralding the arrival of the smart gadget. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports a sharp increase in adults using mobile devices to access the internet, as well as other online activities. Cell phone ownership is stable, but using phones for purposes other than phone calls is going up, up, up.

This marks the beginning of the end of pixel-perfect web design. No longer is there a single fold, above which content cues should reside; no longer can a company focus solely on meeting their audience’s needs by designing for the top three browsers across the top two computer operating systems. Graceful degradation is going the way of the dodo. Instead, we need evolutionary designs, adaptable to a variety of niches.

Companies who have already focused on this typically seek to determine the device being used by a particular user, then serve them content optimized for that device. Unfortunately, with the broad variety of devices in use, it’s difficult to accommodate all of them. Alternatively, they offer a “mobile” or “text-only” link, optimized for users with low bandwidth or smaller mobile devices. Again, we have only a couple of optimizations, and as user trends change, the developers behind a given web application or site must run to keep up.

Built-in design adaptability might work in many cases. For example, a combination of incrementally sized, wrapping modules and liquid layout could flexibly accommodate both broader and shorter resolutions (the Xoom’s resolution, for example, is 1280 x 800). Navigation could be persistent, but fly out on mouseover. Tricky to do, but not impossible. There is no “graceful degradation” because all resolutions are intended to happen. But this is merely robust.

What if the web application itself took this optimization a step further? Imagine these scenarios:

A site that actively analyzes user system demographics and develops UI and navigation options for a variety of interfaces; users can select their preferred default. Depending on the intelligence of the system, these could be based on persona types, or actually customized on a user-by-user basis.

Proactively personalized interface preferences. Based on a user’s interaction behavior, the site infers their content and navigational preferences and presents or suggests an interface matching those. Do they like clicking on tags? Perhaps a tag cloud-driven navigation should be integrated into their UI.

To be honest, I’m not certain what a truly antifragile user experience would look like. But I know we’ll never get there if we don’t think about it; and thinking about it will bring us more robust UX along the way.

references

27 February 2011

Originally posted on UXtraordinary. See the archived original post.

Narrative taxonomy in UX

design thinking, taxonomy

I’ve submitted a proposal for SXSW 2014! Vote here.

User experience and storytelling go hand in hand. UX professionals consciously apply personas, use case scenarios, underlying narratives, content strategy, and visual elements to provide a stage on which users play. But there is a key element missing in this drama: taxonomy. Much more than mere collections of categories, hierarchies, facets, and navigation elements, taxonomies “narrate the natural relationships between concepts.”

That quote is from a 2011 article in the journal Data & Knowledge Engineering, in which three computer scientists explored narrative taxonomy from the perspective of data algorithms in effective, adaptive content retrieval. This session will discuss the implications of narrative taxonomy for user experience design; specific kinds of taxonomy stories; how to recognize, analyze, and apply narrative taxonomies; and the results of user testing against different narrative taxonomies in different contexts.

Preview presentation.

Questions answered

  1. How does a taxonomy tell a story, and what are the narrative elements of that story? How can a UX professional recognize and analyze them without the help of sophisticated database algorithms?
  2. Why and when is analyzing taxonomy from a narrative perspective helpful to UX design? How does it compare to more typical approaches?
  3. In UX, taxonomy is primarily addressed by information architects and content strategists, but not always by both at the same time. Can narrative taxonomy bridge gaps between these different specialties?
  4. What does narrative taxonomy mean from an interactive perspective? What are concrete examples of this? Can users tell their own stories?
  5. How can narrative taxonomies be tested, and what are the results of such tests?

Intention-focused design (UX Matters article)

design thinking

Pabini Gabriel-Petit approached me for an article in UXmatters in May, 2012, and in July published Intention-Focused Design: Applying Perceptual Control Theory to Discover User Intent. Below is the article as it appeared.

At this point in the development of the field of user experience, I’m assuming that most good UX professionals know how to tailor sites or applications to user profiles, create personas, and tell a compelling story that drives user process flows. But sometimes we encounter a situation that’s a bit more challenging: we’re asked to design one product for very different users—or even users with seemingly conflicting goals.

Without a unifying narrative, such challenges can result in compromised user experiences. A client, or even a UX designer, may find it simpler to either target the most valuable or common user profile or to design very different process flows and interactions for different users. These approaches aren’t necessarily bad, but integrating them gracefully is difficult without a shared context. Intention-focused design is a specific UX strategy that can help you to discover hidden and shared user narratives.

Perceptual Control Theory and User Intentions

You know you’ve got a good piece of software when people use it for purposes for which the designers never intended or designed.
—Clay Shirky

Psychology is the UX designer’s friend. We use it all the time. Our process flows and interfaces apply learning, perception, and cognition theory. Decision-making research, gamification, and emotional appeals evoke the appropriate response to the stimuli we provide. But the most useful framework for understanding users that I’ve encountered is a little-known system called Perceptual Control Theory (PCT). The invention of William Powers, an engineer with degrees in physics and psychology, PCT is based equally in cybernetics and psychology. It has recently been gaining ground as a useful framework in areas such as education and psychotherapy.

The basic premise of PCT is that human behavior is not about the behavior itself, but about reinforcing desired perception. William James said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” William Powers suggests that behavior is not just about agreement, but about constantly refining our experience to achieve an agreeable level of perception.

For example, a bagger at a grocery store who packs items carefully—cold with cold, fragile on top—may be reinforcing a self-perception as a caring, careful person. An executive who signs the order for a layoff may be reinforcing a self-perception as a strong, dominant person. A voter voting against his own interests may be reinforcing a perception of himself as a moral person. A programmer who writes elegant code may be reinforcing a self-perception as being a particularly rational human.

PCT suggests that a person starts off with a desired reference point for her experience. (This may change over time.) She compares her environment to that reference point and takes action to bring it closer to her desired perception. She compares the result to her reference point and acts accordingly. If something external, called a disturbance, interacts with her environment, the same comparison of input and reference point recurs, resulting in the appropriate output, or behavior. This feedback loop is the core of PCT. As Powers wrote, “Control is a process by which a person can maintain some controlled variable near a reference condition by varying actions that oppose the effects of disturbances.”

In UX terms, users actively work to optimize their own experience as much as possible. Let’s take a look at how a user-focused PCT feedback loop works, as shown in Figure 1.

A UX-style PCT user feedback loop

Figure 1. A UX-style PCT user feedback loop

PCT goes further: it reminds us that what we think a person is doing and what they think they’re doing can sometimes be very different. Powers demonstrated this very simply at a presentation to the American Education Research Association in the 1990’s.

Using a large, knotted rubber band, a chalk board, and a piece of chalk, he asked a volunteer to maintain the knot over a dot, while also holding a piece of chalk there. Powers then pulled the other end of the rubber band around in a large circle. Although Powers took care to move deliberately and not too fast, the volunteer’s chalk described a smaller circle on the board. Powers then asked the audience what the volunteer had done, and they replied that he had drawn a circle. But when Powers asked the volunteer what he’d done, he said he had held the knot over the dot.

The volunteer neither expected nor intended to draw a circle, but worked to maintain the knot’s placement. However, despite hearing the instructions and watching the demonstration, the audience had seen the visible evidence of the volunteer’s behavior, the circle, as the primary object. An analyst looking at the behavior without having heard the instructions might easily take the circle to be the purpose of the exercise.

PCT is valuable to UX designers because it helps them discover what users actually think rather than what we think they think.

Transformative Design

Several design challenges benefit directly from intention-focused design. Next, I’ll discuss how to apply intention-focused design when we’re asked to transform a site or application.

Occasionally, a UX designer or creative team receives a request to completely re-envision a site or application. Perhaps the company’s business value is changing, or the site has to adapt to the mobile world. Yet the site may have a strong following of users who are content with the site as it is, so resist change. Often UX designers offer users a more usable interaction, then are surprised by a vehement negative response. It’s a truism that users resist change. The PCT insight that people desire equilibrium at their personal reference point goes to the heart of this.

A person’s desired reference states operate in a hierarchy of importance and awareness. People work to maintain equilibrium at different levels of being. I’ve adapted this hierarchy for a compassionate animal lover from a 1982 diagram from psychologists Charles Carver and Michael Scheier:

  • System concept: Be a compassionate person.
  • Principle: Be kind to animals.
  • Program: Walk the dog.
  • Relationship: “Dog walkingness” sequence: Keep the dog from running into traffic by pulling on his leash, tightening his choke collar. (I know, I know. Wait for it.)
  • Transition: Pull on the leash.
  • Configuration: Fingers around the leash.
  • Sensation: Friction of the fabric against your fingers.
  • Intensity: Muscle tension.

The animal lover simultaneously compares all of these perceptions to an expected, desired reference point, but those that are lower in the hierarchy can change in response to new information—provided they match the deeper expectations of system and principle. But I know that choke collar is bothering you, so let’s provide our dog owner with new information: choke collars are painful to dogs. The animal lover’s self-perception as a compassionate person and the principle of kindness to animals trumps maintaining equilibrium in the “Walk the dog” program or “dog walkingness” relationship. A new program appears: Buy a walking harness.

You have to address not just the level of environmental equilibrium, but the deeper levels of purpose and self-perception. Not doing this can result in debacles like the Netflix separation of streaming and DVD viewing. Had anyone at an empowered level said, “Customers don’t want DVDs or streaming video, they want movies and entertainment,” they might have averted the loss of customers. Great design actively engages purpose and self-perception to change the user’s environmental expectations, effectively resetting their equilibrium to a new state.

The Hidden User

Sometimes a site’s users are not the only participants in its narrative. For example, the medical software company I work for provides software for quite a few highly specific user personas: nurses, therapists, schedulers, billers, marketers, and more. Some of these are not only very different, but initially seem to have conflicting interests.

I struggled with this when I first began—looking for the underlying hook that would tie a good, user-centered design together; chunking out different user activities; getting data from customers and coworkers who knew them deeply. But it was a PCT analysis of their intentions that exposed their shared narrative. Part of every persona’s internal script was a hidden user the persona focused on every day: the patient. From then on, patient first became the design mantra, and I’ve set aside all design that doesn’t center on that hidden, absent user.

A retail site offering educational toys and tools for children offers another example of a hidden user. Parents, educators, and others are on the site, but the purpose they all have in common is a better-educated child who enjoys learning. That child is the absent user, providing the context for a taxonomy based on age, special needs, specific curricula, and other factors driving customer intention.

User-Empowering Design

When designing solutions for user activities, it is very easy to fall into the common-sense trap. Anyone trained in experimental methodology knows that common-sense assumptions are often proven wrong. For example, in a study of the likelihood that drivers would call 911 or otherwise act in a dangerous situation, the results were surprising.

Someone looking like a small child walked beside a rural road, a suburban road, and a busy highway. Common sense might make people expect more 911 calls from the busy road, because more people were there. But the opposite occurred: the more people were present, the fewer calls or offers of help they made. Analysis revealed that drivers on the little-used road figured there might not be anyone else to help, so they took action. Drivers on the busy highway figured someone else must’ve already called, so took no action. The response on the suburban road fell in between.

My favorite example of a common-sense design mistake is the typical business mental model for sharing user-generated content. Viewing users as single units in a much larger pool of users, who touch only some of that pool, businesses place a user at the center of an ever-expanding circle of sharing: user, friends, site members, public, as shown in Figure 2.

But users don’t perceive themselves that way. They experience themselves as the horizon between their self and their world, and they adjust how they share according to a greatly varying series of needs. With a friend, they might share dreams and romantic details, but not the physical details of a medical problem. With a doctor, the opposite holds true. Both kinds of data are intimate details, but shared intimacy is not the same across the board. Different groups of people receive different kinds and levels of information.

Typical behavior-focused business concept of a user’s mental model versus an intention-focused model

Figure 2. Typical behavior-focused business concept of a user’s mental model versus an intention-focused model.

Here, the user’s system concept might be a desire to be likable to as many people as possible. As a result, the user might share only information that is appropriate, to avoid putting people off by sharing too much. Of course, people vary, and context should always drive analysis of user intentions. LiveJournal got this years ago, offering highly customizable, user-created groups years before other social networks—but the social circles of Google+ are hands-down the best design implementation of it.

Recap

Intention-focused design deliberately empowers users as active, goal-driven participants in shaping their experience. In this article, my goal was to introduce the concept of Perceptual Control Theory at a high level, showing why it redefines our basic understanding of user analysis beyond site interactions and immediate goals to deeper levels of intent. As examples, I showed three strategic uses of intention-focused design: getting a handle on site transformation, discovering hidden users, and empowering users through design.

References

Carver, Charles S., and Michael F. Scheier. “Control Theory: A Useful Conceptual Framework for Personality—Social, Clinical, and Health Psychology.” APA Psychological Bulletin, 1982, Volume 92, Number 1.1.

Powers, William T. Behavior: The Control of Perception. 2nd ed. Montclair, NJ: Benchmark Publications, Inc., 2005.

Powers, William T. “The Nature of PCT. Control Systems Group. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 1995. Retrieved June 1, 2012.

Originally posted on UXmatters and cross-posted on former personal blog UXtraordinary.com.

Habitual creativity: Turn around

design thinking, inspiration

For a little over two years, I left work and went to a particular bus stop on Elliott & Western in Seattle. So I spent a little time every day looking at this building, near the base of a hill leading up to the Queen Anne Hill area.

Building facing bus stop

One day, for whatever reason, I turned around and looked behind me. Due to an accident of unusual angles (hills, buildings, streets), suddenly I could see everything the building was hiding from me, including the Space Needle!

building-behind-busstop

The beauty of turning around is that it changes your perspective. Sometimes it even shows you the forest for the trees—or in this case, the neighborhood for the buildings.

So how do you turn around, metaphorically speaking? Here are some straightforward and a couple less obvious methods:

  • Try the other person’s perspective on for size. You may not end up agreeing with it, but you’ll understand it better, and this process frequently provides insight into design challenges. You UX people are used to this one. 
  • Are you looking from the outside in, or UI first? Try flipping it. Do the mental exercise of imagining your web application from the back end out – network to content buckets to databases to identifying the right content to surfacing, navigating, and consuming it. Getting a better understanding of the building blocks will let you do more with your Lego.
  • Set yourself challenges that push you beyond your normal boundaries to see the point of view inside someone else’s. For example, find a song you like in all the music genres you can think of.
  • Like sitting alone? Join a group. Like groups? Try taking some time away from them.
  • Reverse the flow. (No, not that flow.) Does your taxonomy go from broad to specific? Why not try specific to broad? Or, put everything on the same level and make it flat. The meaningful concepts will float to the top.

UX happens everywhere

design thinking, psychology

“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” said William James. Although James wasn’t talking about user experience as designers think of it, this is my favorite UX quote, and one I believe every UX architect, designer, or strategist should keep in mind. Today I’m writing about the implications this has on where we should focus our attention.

Where a person’s attention goes, there goes their experience of the world. In other words, UX happens everywhere.

Your product may be the ultimate experience you want your users to have, and your web site experience may help get them to purchase it (or be the goal itself, if you’re a social network or some other online service). But long before they land on your site or purchase your product, every interaction of the user with your brand is UX.

What people say about your product on social networks or blogs, your advertising (online and off), how your competitors represent you and your service. Your content lives everywhere, and your existing users and prospects can potentially encounter it everywhere. You can’t control this, but you can add to the milieu in a variety of ways: blogs, forums, social networks, videos, mobile applications, gadgets, rich media advertising, news, and choosing to advertise on more targeted sites.

Why does this matter? Because people make decisions in an all-or-nothing manner. Neurologically speaking, every encounter creates a positive or negative moments in a user’s head—a yes/no binary decision. A user’s overall impression comes from the preponderance of the individual binary choices associated with a concept.

Further, in the absence of knowledge most people tend to go with whatever information gets in first with the most. In this way informational cascades are spread across a population which may or may not be accurate. (This may be why car salespeople are trained to get customers to say “yes” more than once, and to speak to more than one salesperson. You can read more about binary decision making and informational cascades in The tyranny of dichotomy.)

If you expect users to “agree to attend” to ultimately experience your product, one way is to create more positive binary moments about your brand and product than there are negative ones. Every encounter with your brand weights a user’s interest in one direction or another. As UX strategists, it’s clearly in our interests as UX strategists to create positive user experiences in every relevant context possible.

Update: I don’t think I said clearly enough here that “positive” requires an experience to be honest and to the user’s advantage. So I’m saying it now.

Originally posted on the alexfiles (1998–2018) on January 1, 2011.

Simplicity is not a goal, but a tool

design, design thinking

Simplicity in design is not a goal by itself, but a tool for better experience. The goal is the need of the moment: to sell a product, to express an opinion, to teach a concept, to entertain. While elegance and optimal function in design frequently overlaps with simplicity, there are times that simplicity is not only not possible but hurts usability. Yet many designers do not understand this, and over the years, I’ve seen the desire to “keep it simple, stupid,” lead to poor UX.

I was therefore glad to see Francisco Inchauste’s well-thought, longer version of Einstein’s “as simple as possible, but no simpler” remark.

From the column:

As an interactive designer, my first instinct is to simplify things. There is beauty in a clean and functional interface. But through experience I’ve found that sometimes I can’t remove every piece of complexity in an application. The complexity may be unavoidably inherent to the workflow and tasks that need to be performed, or in the density of the information that needs to present. By balancing complexity and what the user needs, I have been able to continue to create successful user experiences.

Plus, as I’ve commented before, messy is fun!

Originally posted on former personal blog UXtraordinary.com.

Evolutional UX

design, design thinking

This was originally posted on the UXtraordinary blog, before I incorporated under that name. Since then this approach has proven successful for me in a variety of contexts, especially Agile (including Scrum, kanban, and Lean UX – which is an offshoot of Agile whether it likes it or not).

I subscribe to the school of evolutional design. In evolution, species change not to reach for some progressively-closer-to-perfection goal, but in response to each other and their ever-changing environment. My user experience must do likewise.

Rather than reach for pixel-perfect, which is relatively unattainable outside of print, (and is probably only “perfect” to myself and possibly my client), I reach for what’s best for my users, which is in the interests of my client. I expect that “best” to change as my users change, and as my client’s services/products change. This approach makes it much easier to design for UX.

Part of evolutional design is stepping away from the graceful degradation concept. The goal is not degraded experience, however graceful, but differently adapted experience. In other words, it’s not necessary that one version of a design be best. Two or three versions can be equally good, so long as the experience is valuable. Think of the differences simply resizing a window can have on well-planned liquid design, without hurting usability. Are the different sizes bad? Of course not.

This approach strongly supports behavioral design, in which design focuses on the behavior and environment of the user. You might be designing for mobile, or a laptop, or video, or an e-newsletter; you might be designing for people being enticed to cross a pay wall, or people who have already paid and are enjoying your service. You might be appealing to different demographics in different contexts. Evolutional UX thinks in terms of adaptation within the digital (and occasionally analog) ecology.

Evolutional UX also reminds the designer that she herself is part of an evolving class of worker, with many species appearing and adapting and mutating and occasionally dying out. We must adapt, or fall out of the game—and the best way to do that is to design for your ever-changing audience and their ever-changing tools.

And now, some words of wisdom from that foremost evolutional ecologist, Dr. Seuss. Just replace the “nitch” spelling with “niche” and you’ve got sound ecological theory, as every hermit crab knows.

And NUH is the letter I use to spell Nutches,
Who live in small caves, known as Nitches, for hutches.
These Nutches have troubles, the biggest of which is
The fact there are many more Nutches than Nitches.
Each Nutch in a Nitch knows that some other Nutch
Would like to move into his Nitch very much.
So each Nutch in a Nitch has to watch that small Nitch
Or Nutches who haven’t got Nitches will snitch.

Designing for purpose

design thinking

This is the first of several presentations applying different psychological systems to user experience.

Designing for users is a tough job. To optimize our designs and strategy, UX professionals frequently turn to concept/site testing. The problem is that most design strategy and testing thinks in terms of input → output. We provide input, users perform a desired response (click-through, purchase, content creation). How to break out of this mold?

Perceptual control theory (PCT) assumes that all output is based on the ultimate goal of improved perceptual input. If you replace “input” in the previous sentence with “experience,” you’ll see the direction this discussion is going…

Originally posted on UXtraordinary, August 3, 2009.

Fun is fundamental

design thinking, game elements, psychology

Fun is a seriously undervalued part of user experience (perhaps of any experience). In fact, a sense of play may be a required characteristic of good UX interaction. But too often, I hear comments like the following, seen on ReadWriteWeb:

When you think of virtual worlds, the first one that probably pops into your head is Second Life, but in reality, there are a number of different virtual worlds out there. There are worlds for socializing, worlds for gaming, even worlds for e-learning. But one thing that most virtual worlds have in common is that they are places for play, not practicality. (Yes, even the e-learning worlds are designed with elements of “fun” in mind).

I was surprised to see the concept of play set in tension with practicality, as if they were incompatible, and to read that “even the e-learning worlds” employed fun. Game elements have been used to promote online learning for well over a decade, and used in offline educational design for much longer.

I certainly don’t mean to imply that every web site can be made fun. But it can employ the techniques of play in order to be more fun. As Clark Aldrich observes, discussing learning environments (emphasis his),

You cannot make most content fun for most people in a formal learning program… At best what you can do is make it more fun for the greatest percentage of the target audience. Using a nice font and a good layout doesn’t make reading a dry text engaging, but it may make it more engaging…

The driving focus, the criteria against which we measure success, should be on making content richer, more engaging, more visual, with better feedback, and more relevant. And of course more fun for most students.

It was while developing an educational site for Nortel Networks that I first discovered the value of game elements in design. Deliberately incorporating mini games, an ongoing “quest” hidden in the process, rewards (including surprise Easter eggs), levels, triggers, and scores (with a printable certificate) made the tedious process of learning how to effectively make use of an intranet database much more fun. We also offered different learning techniques, so users could learn by text, video, or audio, as they preferred.

This can apply to non-learning environments as well. Think about it: online games have already done all the heavy lifting in figuring out the basics of user engagement. Some techniques I’ve found valuable in retail, informational, and social media include:

  • Levels. These provide a sense of achievement for exploration, UGC (user-generated content) or accomplishment. Levels can reduce any possible sense of frustration at the unending quest.
  • Unending quest. There should always be a next step for users. This doesn’t mean the user needs to be told that they’ll never be through with the site. Instead, it should always provide something engaging, that leads them on to a next step, and a next, and so forth.
  • Surprise rewards/triggers. These include Easter egg links, short-term access to previously inaccessible documents, etc.
  • Mini games, which can result in recognition or rewards for the user and can provide research data and UGC for the site.
  • Scores, which can encourage competitiveness and a sense of accomplishment.
  • Avatars and other forms of personalization.
  • User-driven help and feedback. Users (particularly engineers, in my experience) love to be experts. Leverage this to support your help forums if you need them.

Online, offline, crunching numbers at work, immersed in a game, sitting in a classroom, or building a barn, a sense of fun doesn’t just add surface emotional value, it frequently improves the quality of the work and adds pleasant associations, making us more likely to retrieve useful data for later application. Perhaps this is why so many artists and scientists have been known for a sense of play. And for most of us, it’s during childhood – the time we are learning the most at the fastest rate – that we are typically our most playful.

All websites are to some extent educational. Even a straightforward retail site wants you to learn what they offer, how to choose an item, and how to pay for it. Perhaps we can take a tip from our childhood and incorporate more fun into the user experience. Then we can learn how best to learn.

Originally posted on former personal blog UXtraordinary.com.