By Jon Neil, Design Director at CARNEVALE
Why are video games loved so much? A gamer will wait in line for hours anticipating a new release. They’ll play for hours on end. When they’re not gaming, they’re talking to their friends about their favorite games. Have you ever heard anyone get that excited about Gmail?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1145360/Hades/
These are the types of questions we ask and investigate at CARNEVALE when we are creating digital products. If we understand why people behave the way they do and why a product is successful then we can replicate it. So we spent two years asking why. We conducted qualitative interviews with people from all over the U.S., we had discussions with Epic Games (because who knows better than a leading video game and software developer and publisher), we built prototypes, and we experimented. Here’s what we learned.
Video games are emotionally engaging. That subscription pop-up on that one website—not so much. For an experience to be emotionally engaging it needs to go beyond being functional and usable.
For emotional engagement to happen, we can look to Self-Determination Theory and the 3 psychological needs that drive it:
Autonomy
Autonomy is satisfied when people feel like they have choice and ownership over their behavior. The opposite of autonomy is feeling coerced.
Competence
Competence is satisfied when people feel like they can successfully meet the demands of an activity. The opposite of competence is feeling ineffective.
Relatedness
Relatedness is satisfied when the people you care about also care about you. The opposite of relatedness is feeling disconnected and isolated.
These 3 psychological needs exist within everyone. We all want some level of control, a feeling that we are capable, and connection to others. These are so desirable to us, we’ll often put them ahead of functionality and usability—as illogical as that sounds. We’ll forgive an app or software for lacking in what it can do and even put up with inefficiency as long as we are achieving autonomy, competence, or relatedness.
Emotional engagement is only achievable when we accept the fact that we’re not purely logical thinkers and emotions drive our decisions (even more of our decisions are reactive and unconscious). What we like, dislike, hope for, fear — it all drives our motivations and how we interact with the world.
You might have expected to read something about gamification. We are talking about digital experiences and gaming after all. But we need to be careful about falling into the quicksand of buzzwords. Gamification has been around long before video games or digital experiences. In the early 1900s we had Boy Scout badges and Cracker Jack prizes. A hundred years later we still have badges, achievements, and rewards—not much evolution there. The problem with gamification is that we assume people will love any badge or prize we dangle in front of them. The truth is that there are many different types of people with different motivations and passions.
A badge might entice some one who is an achiever (one of the Bartle player types), but what about someone who values socializing or exploration over achievement? We need to stop trying to find a one-size-fits-all solution and start asking individuals what they are passionate about. When we understand this we open up a world of opportunity.
Let’s look at a well-known digital experience, Duolingo. It’s the worlds #1 downloaded language app. It’s been downloaded 575 million times, has over 56.5 million monthly active users. In 2022 Duolingo generated more than $369 million in revenue. Not too shabby.
Duolingo app screenshots from https://press.duolingo.com/
While emotional engagement can’t take sole credit for this success, it certainly has contributed to it. Ask a person why they use Duolingo and you’ll often hear responses like these:
“I can choose what I study, how long I study, and how fast I go.” (autonomy)
“The lessons are quick and easy.” (competence)
“It tells me how iIm doing compared to others.” (relatedness)
Now here are some common reasons people stop using Duolingo:
“If I don’t have enough gems, I get blocked from doing more exercises.” (constrained)
“The notifications constantly remind me that iIm falling behind.” (incompetence)
“It doesn’t provide real conversations.” (isolating)
Seeing a pattern here?
Think about a digital experience you really enjoy. Not just a tool you use a lot, but an app or software that means more to you. Is there one that you look forward to using? Why is that? What does it do differently?
Providing autonomy, competence, and relatedness isn’t enough on it’s own. We also need to frequently express that these needs are being met. We do that with feedback loops. Here’s what a feedback loop looks like.
Woof. Pretty boring. Here’s a better representation:
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
A conversation is a series of feedback loops. They happen so fast we barely think about it. Here’s an example of feedback loop within a conversation:
Action: You tell a joke
Reaction: Someone laughs
Decision: You choose to tell another joke
Video games are amazing at providing feedback loops. They’re almost nothing BUT feedback loops. They are conversations where we take action via controller or keyboard, the game reacts, moving our character, telling us where to go, how fast we should go, and with that information we make a decision on what to do next. Here’s a trailer from a popular Nintendo game:
It is constantly acknowledging us and rewarding us for being part of the conversation. Your character responds to your every instruction. You know when an enemy is approaching and when they’ve been defeated. You know what items can and should be collected. When something should be avoided. When you get a special power, your character changes. You can see progress towards your goals. Immediate, frequent, and obvious—what else could you ask for!
We have feedback in other digital experiences. It often looks like this:
Compared to a video game, it’s no wonder why so many digital experiences lack emotional engagement. They have weak feedback loops. Even more often, digital experiences don’t have feedback loops at all and that’s because the creators aren't thinking about their audience or trying to have a conversation. They are talking at you, telling you what to do and how to do it. Take TurboTax for example…
I think TurboTax is a great tool. It is very functional and usable. I wouldn’t want to do my taxes without it. It even goes as far as to provide some autonomy and competence by allowing you to do your taxes at your own pace in a flexible order with explanations and tips along the way. And yet, it’s still far from emotionally engaging. Where’s all the feedback?!?! I want to constantly know what I’ve accomplished, what’s left to do, where I’m wrong, where I could save money, how I compare to others.
Every once in a while a digital experience leans into providing feedback loops and more often than not it’s successful. Like real successful. My proof—Domino’s Pizza Tracker.
Now you might look at the tracker and think isn’t that just a goofy progress bar? It’s so much more than that. In the not-so-good ole days you’d have to place an order and then wait anxiously for your pizza to arrive—never knowing if it would be there in a few minutes or a few hours. It drove some of us mad. We would wonder if our order was forgotten, if the driver had been in an accident, or maybe we imagined ordering the pizza all together in some hunger-evoked hallucination. The pizza tracker solved this. It gave us customers competence by sharing the journey of our pizza and where it was at in that journey. It gave us autonomy by not requiring us to wait creepily peeking out between the window blinds as we drooled. It even provided some relatedness and told us who was making and delivering our order. And it delivered all of this information in the form of obvious feedback loops.
But wait, there’s more. On top of all that, the Pizza Tracker had something else important to emotional engagement, and that’s personality.
Once we acknowledge a users emotional needs and incorporate that into feedback loops, we then have to express those ideas through the appropriate mood. We do this by introducing personality. Sometimes this is referred to as branding, visual design, aesthetics, voice, etc. I try not to get hung up on labels and where one ends and another begins and instead celebrate them all as important ingredients in UX soup.
A mistake often made here is assuming personality is decoration. The purpose of decoration is make something more attractive by adding stuff. Personality is sculpting content and pacing to appeal to a person aspirations. Look at Headspace, one of the world’s most popular meditation apps:
Headspace didn’t invent meditation or mindfulness, but many people, myself included, had preconceptions of what those things were and what type of person practiced them. The stereotype looked like this:
Headspace’s personality shows us that meditation doesn’t require crystals or incense. You don’t have to sit in unfamiliar poses or chant. You don’t have to know what your third-eye is or worry about opening it. Headspace wants you to see that meditation is approachable and they do that by using expressive illustrations and easy-to-understand text. They also mention time a lot. It’s important that you know sessions are quick. This all adds up to Headspace‘s primary personality trait—casual. That personality breaks down a barrier of intimidation that once kept people from engaging.
The biggest mistake we can make with personality is choosing an inappropriate one.
Not every experience should be playful, fun, or humorous. Cartoon mascots, puns, and confetti isn’t engaging if you’re audience is trying to pay a parking ticket or find a veterinarian for their sick puppy. People want to feel heard and understood. Personality is how we show people they are where they should be.
Unfortunately, sometimes in attempt to engage with people, product owners unintentionally end up manipulating their audiences. Even worse, sometimes that manipulation is intentional. This happens in the form of dark patterns like feature fog, loss aversion, confirmshaming, and infinite scrolling to name a few. These tactics might increase interactions, usage, and subscriptions in the short term and might lead someone to believe their users are highly engaged, but they are short-sighted, false-positive analytics. Users cannot be truly engaged with an experience if decisions are being made for them, if they are being mislead, or social expectations are used against them.
Designers and the organizations they work with are realizing that it’s no longer enough to just make digital experiences work. Functionality and usability doesn’t automatically equal adoption and retention. For future success (and I do mean revenue and profit) we must make experiences that really connect with folks on an emotional level. Whether it’s an app, software, or new gadget, the ability to make people feel is a secret weapon for building trust, keeping customers happy, and making a brand that people love.
Are you a disagreeing designer, intrigued product manager, strategy fanatic? At CARNEVALE, we live for conversation, experimentation, and iteration. Please tell us how you feel! What digital experiences are emotionally engaging to you?