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