Lessons in UX: Are addicting experiences good or bad for users?
Farmville.
Desktop Tower Defense.
World of Warcraft.
Twitter.
All of the above have one thing in common: for many many users they are incredibly addictive experiences, sucking hours and hours of time away from them day after day. Updates from games like Farmville has become the only thing I see now when I go to Facebook. So, in response to this phenomena, I have two questions… First, is this a good or bad thing? Second, what makes these experiences addictive?
Let’s take the second question first: What makes these experiences addictive, and how can we leverage the design practices they have in our designs? Here’s what I have identified:
Positive reinforcement. When the users accomplish tasks in the programs, they get immediately rewards – leveling up, more friends or followers, a more profitable crop, etc. The reward is obviously tied to the effort and for many people, this is the only immediate gratification they get when they are sitting in front of a computer screen (because many online experiences, well, they aren’t very friendly or usable).
Immediacy. There is very little planning that users need to do to interact with these experiences – they can open the browser or access the game on their computers and in they go. This ties to my opinion that we are living in a time where the real-time web and the immediacy of now is filing in users free time. Bored? Play Tower Defense or write updates on Twitter.
Learnability. Almost all of these systems have simple, obvious control patterns. The most complex of them all, World of Warcraft, is still quite easy to understand with very little ramp-up. I maintain a mark of a good game or online experience is that novice users can pick up the controls (be they mouse or gamepad) and immediately start doing something. Those systems that have a demo or introductions… well, often they are covering over a crappy interaction model that is not easy to learn or use.
The social experience. You are not alone when you are working within these designs, and in many ways the whole purpose of the design is social in nature (see Twitter). We interact, we share ideas, we react to inputs that are not generated “in nature.” Which brings me to…
It stimulates us. We are an incredibly interactive species, and even our most sedentary crave stimulation. These experiences feeds that need to do something, and when it comes to stimulation, we wouldn’t be here as a species if we didn’t crave such stimulation (see: procreation).
Now, onto the second question: Is it good or bad for users? Well, I’m a libertarian so my immediate response is that it can be both – if users enjoy an experience then let them enjoy it to the fullest. It is, of course, the definition of “fullest” where things get hairy for some on the outside looking in. I think the obvious example is that any human being can die from drinking too much water too fast – there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
But., compared to other forms of entertainment that many abuse, society should not cast a worrying eye towards addicting online experiences. We have a lot more things to be concerned about.
