unconscious) perception of consequences relating to their play. In our initial designs, merchants made customizations in a lightbox—a web UI technique that creates a new layer, similar to a pop-up window, within the same webpage. This lightbox treatment has the effect of focusing a user on a specific aspect of the task while leaving the webpage they were working on somewhat visible and completely unchanged. Our final designs incorporated these customization features inline, on the same webpage where users added required information to create a payment button.

The interesting aspect of promoting play in a lightbox is that the lightbox comes with an escape hatch in case anything goes wrong. A merchant “ playing” in the lightbox can always click on the Cancel button to undo their changes and return to the previous page. Inline customization does not have this easy, one-click method of removing all changes.

Novel Interaction. Although this was not a factor in our experiences with PayPal products, novel forms of interaction can certainly contribute to wow experiences. Nintendo’s Wii and Apple’s iPhone, for example, both introduced novel interaction techniques to the general public. The Wii reinvented gaming by introducing a controller that understood and responded to physical motion. The iPhone

reinvented mobile telephony by replacing almost all of the physical buttons on a cellular phone with software-driven, multitouch interface.

Neither the Wii nor the iPhone invented these interaction techniques. In both cases, the designers took existing interaction techniques, improved upon them, and applied them in unexpected

ways. Changing the interaction paradigm in existing product categories can help produce wow experiences.

Acknowledgements Special thanks to those who contributed to the projects described in this article. Many of the design ideas belong to these incredibly collaborative teams.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Dr. James M. Hudson is a senior user experience researcher at PayPal, an eBay Inc. company. Trained as a computer scientist,

Jim is fascinated with how small aspects of design produce profound psychological shifts in how we interact with products and with one another in technologically mediated environments. He also spends much of his time thinking about how to develop innovative, user-centered products within corporate constraints. When he’s not wearing his researcher hat, Jim teaches and

dances Argentine tango.

Multiple Wows So, how do we wow our customers? Simply put, this is the wrong question. The cliché of wowing customers is an imprecise goal that provides little useful direction to designers. Moving beyond the cliché, we’ve suggested that there are, in fact, multiple types of wow and detailed a few different design factors that contribute to each. We’ve made the case for distinguishing between wow experiences and wow products, but there are still other types of wow. Don Norman, for example, has argued that wow aesthetics play an important role [ 2]. We could make a case for wow technologies or wow business processes. As a community, we still have much work to do if we want to fully understand the intricacies and interconnections involved in designing—and talking about—multiple wows.

Kameshwari Viswanadha is
a senior user interaction
designer at PayPal, an
eBay Inc. company. With a
background in building
architecture, Kay now
designs interactions for PayPal’s payment
products. Her key areas of interest include
shaping products through great user expe-
rience, supporting decision making through
visual communication, and connecting with
users through personable design. She is
also a classically trained Indian dancer and
vocalist.

[ 2] Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books, New York.

DOI: 10.1145/1456202.1456217
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0100 $5.00

January + February 2009

Designing “wow” must be an ongoing conversation. Those interested in joining this conversation should visit our blog at http://www.designingwow.com. We encourage all disciplines and experiences to join us online.