Designing play experiences for tech products
How one of gaming's most important concepts can change the how tech products are designed
A few months ago I saw a tweet that read something like “HBO Max feels like if its creators asked themselves ‘How can we tell our users we hate them without telling them we hate them?’”. For anyone who’s used HBO Max before it should come as no surprise, the interface sucks, the user experience is very poor and people only stay because it’s the place to see the next GOT spinoff.
Most tech startups aren’t so lucky to have one of the best content creation machines behind their products, so they can’t get away with designing a product their users hate. So what’s the alternative? Well, most of the time (even in B2B), when the end user is a human being, you have to design for human beings.
This is what I thought when I came across the gaming concept of Play Experience, which Colleen Macklin, et.al., develop so well in the book “Games, Design, and Play”.
A videogame designer has to think about the types of play or play experience that they want to give their users; this will be dependent on who their target user is, understanding what they want, and also what the designer wants to achieve with the game.
Besides a very quick overview of which types of play experiences there are, I’m going to explore here how that framework can be applied to any tech product where the end user is a human being and why it’s important to think about the experience of the user when designing it. Finally, I’m going to complement the list with some other experiences that I believe apply to consumer products.
A quick list of play experiences in gaming is:
Competitive: here there are different types like head-to-head, async, and competing against the game itself.
Cooperative: work together to achieve a goal.
Skill-based: players need to develop mental or active skills to complete the goals of the game.
Experience based: content heavy, focused on experiencing something in the game.
Chance and uncertainty: contrary to skill, here the outcome doesn’t depend on the players but on chance (someday I’ll write on the dangers of developing an experience purely based on chance and how to mix with skill for a better user experience, but not today).
Whimsical: silly, funny, feels like you’re a 10 y-o at Disneyworld.
Role-play: comes in the name, tells a story by allowing players to act in roles.
Performative: this mixes the virtual with the real world, where the main experience depends on the player’s performance (interesting for mobile AR games).
Expressive: the purpose of the game is to express an idea or feeling by the designer.
Simulation-based: the game emulates (in a detailed way, hyper-simplified, or anything in between) some aspect of the real world. Think of FIFA.
Now, if you paid attention you’re probably thinking “well, FIFA is not only simulation, but also competitive, or even cooperative, and it’s also mostly skill-based”. This is 100% correct, many games are a combination of different types of play, but all share one thing: the designer tailors the game based on the play experience she wants to give her players.
Alright, now that we have the clay to play with (pun not intended), how do we apply it to other sectors?
The best way to illustrate this and not bore you to death (it’s almost Christmas after all) is with an example. Let’s say we want to build an app in the fitness space; our main target is to help people be more active. What player (user) experiences can we tap into to achieve the best result?
The answer to that question will determine the path that our app will take, how we’ll design it, and how we market it. And it’s all based on our target audience.
We decided to go for a running app (because of the huge target audience and the rise in popularity). The first question to ask is who we want to target. Looking into different studies (this is real information btw), we realize that we’re best targeting the following profiles:
Males (54%) between 36-45, high education, run 2x a week, individually, not their main sport, go to 1x running events per year, run because of ease of practice and high perceived advantage of running, low indices of individual or social quitting factors have a 64% probability of using a running app.
Females (46%) between 26-45, low/middle education, run 2x/week, individually, not their main sport, 1x events per year, low ease of practice as determinant, high perceived advantage, high levels of individual and social quitting factors have a 75% probability to use a running app.
Because we’re very practical, we will create a product that targets those profiles and design the play (use) experience based on that.
The first thing I’d think here is the reasons why these people quit running or lose consistency. Looking at the profiles we know that they’d stop running if it becomes harder (because they chose running for ease of use) and, (more particularly in the case of females) for social reasons; they don’t have friends or a community to keep them engaged.
After that, analyze what makes them run, and increases the probability of using an app. If we look at the profiles, 3 main elements stand out: they run because it’s easy, beneficial and because there’s more people who do it (drawn from going to a running event and social quitting). So how do we design a product that will serve all these needs, by lowering the probability of quitting and making the potential users more likely to use our app?
Well, we choose our play (use) experiences. There are obviously a lot of paths here and no single right answer, but for the sake of simplicity let’s say we’ll make a cooperative, skill-based running app. Our app will allow users to team up, with friends or with other users the app chooses based on goals, level, age, etc., to achieve a certain goal and compete with others. As they make progress, users see both how they’re progressing against other teams (think about leagues were the ones who run the most, fastest, etc., depending on the specific goal, get to advance to the next league for the same goal). It would look like this:
Matt, 35, wants to increase his 5k speed. He finds other users with the same goal and, because his friends are torn between non-runners and marathoners, he needs people with the same level and objectives to not be discouraged (first layer of social + making the experience easier by realistic comparisons). He meets his team through a matching system in the app and they all make a commitment to run 3x a week. The whole team starts in the bronce league, which is made up of 20 different teams in the same situation. As they maintain their objectives, Matt and his team progress to the next league, which requires them to increase speed a bit to keep up. If they don’t keep their speed or start running less, they go back to the bronce league.
The team/league system allows users to motivate each other as people in the team who want to defeat other teams will hold each other accountable and eventually even kick out non-committed members (these are our power users). The cooperation element and the fact that competition increases progressively takes advantage of another game design element.1
The progressive system also helps with the “running for the benefits” factor. As they progress, you can show the users how their overall health improves and even show them a decrease probability of heart diseases. If done right, this can trigger dopamine hits that promote retention.
By now you can see we’re targeting both the quitting factors and the ones that increase probability of use within the app. As I said, there are a lot of ways to attack this, and as long as we match our users behaviors with our play experiences, we’ll get an audience. Now, if someone does this, do send me an email and lets chat.
I previously wrote about behavioral principles to monetize and I plan to expand on that another time so I won’t go over that, but it also taps into the play experience principle. If the users have a play experience that keeps them engaged then most likely than not there’s a way to monetize.
Finally, I don’t think our play experience list is exhaustive, especially for consumer products, so I’d add some others that can be used (if you think of others, feel free to send them my way!):
Social: when talking B2C, this is fundamental. I think most (but not all) B2C tech products should have some social component to work, but you can also center the whole play experience on being social (this is how Strava became the best at the running game).
Single player: the opposite can be true, and can work in some instances.
Creator focused: the best social media companies don’t really create that much content, they give creators the tools and incentives to do so, and the “watchers” the experience to consume content.
Content focused: here, the experience revolves around consuming the content that the company itself creates. Think about the Nike+ Run Club app, with all the recorded running sessions (or most gaming studios). Actually, I’d say Netflix is a mix of both “creator” (this is a stretch but give me a break) and own content focused.
Long/short play sessions: the difference between League of Legends and Candy Crush, or Netflix and TikTok.
These are some examples that I think should be added to the list (still not exhaustive tho).
The point being, when thinking of building a product with a human being is the end user, it is usually a good strategy to follow the path of knowing who the intended target is, understand their motivations, incentives, behaviors, and building a play experience that target those to improve the probability of good retention and engagement with the product.
Feel free to subscribe below (I plan to do these more often next year):
Mainly, you want the player to feel challenged (skill), but not stressed. Both getting bored because there’s no challenge and getting too stressed can lead players to quit. Here, we allow people to feel challenge by competing and holding each other accountable, but also increase the level of difficulty by allowing them to move up in leagues as they progress, so they don’t get bored.