Playfulness in product design

We know about Amazon Echo and Nest‘s automated fleet of home-monitoring devices. Now look at this owl. Yes, that’s right. It’s essentially a camera which essentially has similar functionality as those other devices, but it’s got an actual personality. It’s not just a robotic AI voice that tells you things, but comes with actual expressions and animated eye movements.

You’re undoubtedly familiar with products that win over the competition by being friendlier and more “fun” than the rest — such as the Nessie Ladle or the newer line of Polaroid cameras. But why are they so rare? When they come out, they come out springing and leaping, undercutting the market and winning over customers not by bragging about how it is twenty percent faster or more efficient, but doing so by pure emotion.

I won’t be the first to say it, but corporate environments struggle with this more than a baby struggles with finishing an ice-cream before it melts. It’s not that they lack creativity; it’s that their hierarchical management system simply doesn’t allow for the “fun” ideas to get to market. Senior VPs and Product Owners love to play it safe as long as they can meet their numbers for the quarter, and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters to them.

Meanwhile, we have bands of a few twenty-somethings hacking together a rough prototype of a working product with a massive appeal and launching it in a matter of weeks from Kickstarter, like that owl. This kind of competition is crucial for innovation to progress and for breakthroughs to be made. Otherwise we’d be living in a world where products have no personality and only live to serve the basic requirements of what they should do.

Identifying areas to embed playfulness isn’t even that tough. Every consumer product has an action that the user performs over and over again. In software products, it’s usually playing with the navigation to get from one place to the next. A popular game design philosophy is to take that repetitive action and make it as fun as possible: introduce some random variation and make the player feel rewarded for doing it over and over. It never gets boring and the user is entertained.

Despite the plethora of options, Carrot Weather is still a lot of people’s favorite weather app for a reason. For a task that’s as habitual as checking the weather every day (and multiple times a day), there’s no better way to get your forecast than a string of randomized quotes that are narrated to you by a sarcastic, passive-aggressive robot AI which loves to insult the human race. Seriously, check out this app if you haven’t already.

If your product is a music discovery app, display some statistics about who else liked the song that the user has just liked. Switch it up every time based on the most relevant data: show where the other likers are from, how recently they liked it, a trend chart of the song’s popularity, etc. This gives a frequent action (a like for a song) the added variability of being unpredictable about what statistic it’s going to display upon liking, which in turn hooks the user to the app.

Goofiness in design is also utterly underrated. There’s nothing wrong at all with breaking formality in order to relate to the user more. Using a silly mascot who does ridiculous things based on the user’s certain milestone achievements works really well. Having a memorable character pop-up every now and then also reinforces branding and adds a delightful tone.

If you have a 401k savings calculator trying to appeal to a college demographic, your elegant and clean UI is not going to instill as much trustworthiness as you might expect in that audience. Instead, if you try a more down-to-Earth tone in your messaging and try to talk to your user as if they were a normal person, you’d have a much better shot at customer loyalty and app retention rates.

Again, this is something that corporations are deathly afraid of trying for the same reasons as mentioned previously. There’s very little room to roll the dice when you’ve managed to garner a userbase of millions with tried and true methodologies.

Take note if you feel that your hair-dryer could do better. Product idea: have it narrate positively enforcing lines such as “You look dashing today!” or “Sweet curls”. If internet-of-things devices can talk, we might as well make it fun and not treat our existence as some technological utopia of bland and monotonous robots telling us what to do every day. Corporations should really try to adapt their stance on this and start to realize the merits of offbeat product design. After all, human emotions can’t be quantified in earnings reports.