Design for addiction: Three rules from Tetris and Twitter
Ever spent time playing a video game or tapping away at a website and discovered that hours have unexpectedly slipped by without you noticing?
It’s not an accident: some user experiences are addictive.
The secret is to feed people small, simple tasks with tiny rewards keeps them following – Â like ET following the trail of M&Ms in the movie.
What Tetris can teach us
Tetris is a perfect example. It’s one of the most addictive and enduring videogames. Every few seconds a new block falls. The only task is to move it and rotate it as it drops so that it fits (or doesn’t).
Success is rewarded with a small sound and a flash as a completed line disappears. Then another block drops. You don’t have time to get bored or distracted.
When the game ends, you’re left with the sense that you must be able to do better next time since it’s all so ‘easy’. Perfect addiction.
Twitter is the same. When you start out, you find yourself clicking through profile after profile to build up a friend list.
Once you reach a critical mass of friends, there’s always something happening. Short messages are always popping up from people you’ve declared an interest in. Read one and another follows.
Twitter: Just a quick go. What’s the harm?
But not like this…
The opposite of this is user experiences where complex tasks are jumbled up with simple ones, where the user gets no feedback and where the user is forced to wait for more than 2-3 seconds and so becomes aware of the passage of time.
Three simple rules
- Short, simple tasks
- A slowly rising difficulty curve
- Frequent feedback with no ugly pauses.
Now, I’m off play a quick game of Tetris.
Just one…
About the author
Giles has been making products more usable for over fifteen years. He was President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association from 2003-2007 and speaks frequently on usability in the UK and overseas. He writes on usability for Revolution magazine and was one of the editors of the PAS 78 accessibility guide from the British Standards Institute. Email Giles, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
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The iPhone/iPod Touch app Flight Control is a prefect example of that.
It has the short, simple task of guiding planes down, the gradual increase in difficulty and it just keeps going until you make a mistake. Very, very addictive!
It’s only about 59p, but they’ve sold 700k+ copies to date!
Good reading and so much can be said about optimizing key journeys or functions first and then building around that.
Frightening thought, that people’s attention span is no more than 2-3 seconds – and if you keep them waiting for longer than that you’ve lost them from your site/ application. I wonder if there’s such a thing as App Rage – where people end up throwing their gadget across the room in rage for being kept waiting for longer than those few seconds….?