How do you make products “fun”
It’s a thing I’ve been hearing more and more at Facebook. For a lot of the user-facing product we’re building, we need to make sure it’s “fun.” If the teens aren’t coming, the solution is to figure out how to make it more “fun.” We add stickers, emojis, cute sounds, bouncy animations, dinosaurs and selfies in the name of fun. We chase an aesthetic of adorable and call it fun.
I’m certainly not trying to hate on this approach to injecting fun into our product. Cute is delightful. It’s just a really narrow view of what fun means. It’s definitely one way of making a product fun, but it’s hardly the only. And we handicap ourselves by not embracing all of the ways you can make a product fun.
The problem is, I don’t think we know what fun actually means. It’s one of those “I know it when I see it” sort of deals. Which is problematic; one person’s fun is another person’s cheesy or another person’s dull. If we want to understand the range of tools we have to make a product fun, we need understand what fundamentally makes things fun for people. What is the core essence of fun that all people experience?
This is going to be a little out there, but stick with me. In a 2004 paper on game design, Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek formalized a framework for talking about games and game design. They strived to formalize ideas around why people play games, why people derive fun from them, and how to evaluate a game’s ability to deliver that value. While most of it is only relevant to game design and not product design, their discussion of the core aesthetics of play formalizes why we play games. It gives concrete definitions around what we find “fun.” In particular, the paper describes 8 core play aesthetics that frame why we play games. Many of them are totally irrelevant to products we build but there are a couple worth pointing out:
Sense Pleasure: Things that appeal to this aesthetic delight our senses. They contain beautiful sights and sounds. When we use cute images or rounder photos or fun music, we’re working with sense pleasure. Almost every discussion I’ve heard about making products fun target this aesthetic exclusively. As an industry, we highly value “beautiful apps” that have high aesthetic value. Basically I think we’re stuck on this aesthetic.
Fellowship: We’re social animals so when you work with others and build something, that’s fun. Groups nails this; if you spend time with dedicated admins of active groups, you can tell we are totally delivering on the fellowship aesthetic. They’re excited to create a strong community and work through hard social challenges to get there. By giving people tools to create something great as a group, we can exploit this aesthetic and be fun.
Expression: We like expressing ourselves. We like demonstrating who we are as much as possible. From the music we listen to, the way we talk and the way we dress, we’re constantly trying to communicate who we are. Instagram does this super well; it makes it really easy to communicate things about yourself. I also think that’s a big reason why Snapchat is so popular. You get pretty interesting tools to express yourself in unique ways. The tools are pretty simplistic, but I think it strikes just the right balance of being very expressive while not being overwhelming. As we think about friend sharing and how to make posting fun, think about how expressive we’re enabling people to be. What are small things we can do to help people feel like they’re able to differentiate themselves and show a unique part of themselves?
Submission: Basically when you don’t feel like doing anything, and so you do an activity just to kill time. It’s the reason we love bubble-gum media. The Facebook news feed possibly delivers on this aesthetic better than any other product or game in the world. This is definitely an aesthetic I never thought of as valuable until I read the paper and some discussions about it. We may not put too much stock in people using Facebook to just scroll and kill some time without actively engaging, but sometimes that’s exactly what people want. I don’t imagine us actively building new products to exploit this aesthetic, but sometimes you end up pretty close and it might be worth leaning into this aesthetic. Or at least knowing it’s an option that delivers actual fun to people. The internet basically runs on this aesthetic; it’s why people spend so much time on Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube, Vine, etc.
The rest of them don’t really apply, but you should check out the paper if you’re interested in the other ones. I’m fairly certain most engaging or exciting experiences on Facebook map to some combination of these core play aesthetics. Getting a ton of likes? That could be Fellowship if you’re posting something a little personal and your crew is giving you support. It could be Expression if you feel like you got to share something that was uniquely you and was noticed for it. Maybe it’s Competition (I didn’t list that) because your 500 likes makes you way more popular than your friends.
So when designing fun experiences, these core play aesthetics are just more tools in your tool belt. More angles from which to approach the problem. More ways to understand why a product may or may not have achieved the fun you were expecting. It also gives a shared language to talk about what something as subjective as “fun” can mean.
