It really is
a good thing for
customers to
literally blurt out
‘wow!’ as a
positive reaction
when they’re
emotionally engaged.
To rediscover
what’s good about
‘wow,’ however,
we need to move
beyond the cliché.
feedback is perfectly tailored to
the action. For example, designers of the PayPal Plug-In spent
a considerable amount of time
developing the experience of
creating a single-use credit card
number. In order to create this
number, a user clicks on a button and a single-use number is
generated. However, instead of
seeing this number the moment
it is generated, the user sees an
animation of a credit card with
the numbers rapidly spinning.
Meanwhile, they hear a professionally engineered sound clip
of clicking sounds. Only then is
the single-use credit card number displayed. Strictly speaking,
the number has been created
by the time the animation
begins, but the feedback design
helps to reinforce the unique-ness of this newly generated
number.
In our testing, we’ve noticed
this feedback (animation plus
sound) almost always causes
users to smile. They report that
it makes them feel as if the
number really has been generated for them—that it really has
changed. We’ve even noticed
users repeatedly generating
credit card numbers just to
observe this feedback mechanism.
When the feedback is exactly
right, it helps produce a wow
experience. Getting this feedback right, however, often takes
time and requires many design
iterations that may appear
unnecessary to those focused
strictly on functionality, but it
seems to be a key piece of producing a wow experience.
Invitation to Play. Wow experiences tend to invite play. This
invitation to play seems to be
a result of two design details:
encouraging optional activities
and limiting negative consequences.
1. Optional Activities. In studies of the Button Designer,
merchants had the most fun
with optional aspects of the
design. For example, merchants
could choose to customize the
payment button image and the
appearance of the PayPal check-out pages for their customers.
Although it wasn’t required—
and perhaps because it wasn’t
required—we found that merchants had the most fun when
customizing these optional
features.
If play is optional, however,
this leads to some interesting design implications.
Specifically, including an invitation to play in a design requires
surfacing optional elements
rather than burying them. This
was one of the key changes
as our designs evolved for the
Button Designer. In our final
designs, we removed certain
optional features and hid others under an “optional” section.
Of course, these seemed like
the correct, logical decisions at
the time, and it likely improved
usability. We wanted to help
merchants complete their task
as efficiently as possible, so we
surfaced required elements and
downplayed optional elements.
In taking a task-oriented perspective on usability, however,
we may have lost some of the
play that made our original
designs fun to use.
It’s interesting to note that
these optional features in the
Button Designer also involved
self-expression. Users customizing their payment buttons were
conscious that it would be displayed on their website, which
motivated them to engage and
get the customization right.
This may not be the case when
customization features are
offered in products for personal
use.
2. Avoiding Negative
Consequences. Because play is
optional, it rarely has lasting
negative consequences. In fact,
when negative consequences
occur, they tend to be the reality check that ends play. In the
Button Designer, we changed
our notion of where play occurs
between our initial designs
and our final designs, and
this seems to have an impact
on our merchants’ (perhaps