Engaging User Creativity: The Playful Experience

Social Interaction

The social networking aspects of these sites are one type of recreation—playfulness through interaction with other people. Whether you’re poking someone on Facebook, commenting on a photo 0n Flickr, or virtually dancing the night away with your Second Life friends, it’s clear that play is a key part of these experiences. But social interaction, in and of itself, is not necessarily playful. It requires other creative factors like sharing and customization to support it.

Sharing

Sites like Flickr and YouTube leverage and build upon the creativity of their users. Creative engagement can come in many forms. One of the most important is sharing the fruits of an artistic process. Flickr provides tools for photographers to share their photos, just as YouTube does for videographers, and Second Life lets casual gamers share many kinds of creative experiences. In all of these environments, people derive personal enjoyment from being part of a loosely knit community that provides a forum for their creative talents.

Customization

The classic example of a playful learning activity from the 1950s is the build your own telescope kit that let hobbyists grind their own lenses. It was more fun to see the stars with something you had crafted yourself.

Today, we can build our own unique sneakers with NikeID (Nike Individual Design), an online service that lets users choose the colors of shoe components and add a logo or name to any of 38 styles, as shown in Figure 3.

We can create our own NFL teams, remixing our favorite players into new team configurations, then play our Fantasy Football teams against those built by our friends.

And with the Shutterfly custom book application, shown in Figure 4, we can design a hardcover photo album, laying out the pages the way we want and adding titles and captions.

Customization is not only playful, but it is also deeply intertwined with the creative process. A truly playful user experience gives users the tools to combine existing elements into something new. It lets them draw upon their own expressiveness and imaginations to create new forms. In this creative milieu, users participate for love of the task itself.

Measuring Playability

So how do we measure playfulness? Are there rules of thumb to determine whether a product is playable or engaging? Or is it completely subjective? Do we know it only it when we see it?

To my knowledge, no one has developed any fixed rules in this area of design, so this is new territory. But here are some ideas. In a playful digital product there should be:

• lots of small rewards and positive feedback for taking action—A playful application does something you like when you interact with it. Sometimes the reward can be as simple as an amusing or useful surprise—like the shift in screen orientation from portrait to landscape that occurs when a user rotates the iPhone.
• no negative consequences for experimentation—Users should be free to explore, discover, and possibly fail. In a game, you can try out various moves and start over again. In the Nike application for creating custom shoes, you can sample different colors and styles. The converse of this rule holds true as well. In the staid world of banking applications, which are distinctly unplayful, there are major consequences for experimentation.
• the ability to take someone else’s work and build on it—Whether it be in the form of templates and samples to jump-start your creative work or the opportunity to comment upon, tag, or organize content others have shared, a playful experience should enable users to construct new forms from pre-existing materials.
• frivolous interaction—Facebook has perfected digital social interaction for no good reason other than pure fun. All playful applications should have a component of interactive silliness.

The Workspace Is the New Play Space

In the digital world, we are beginning to blur the lines between social and professional—and likewise between diversion and work. One of the reasons for this blurring of boundaries is the increase in the number of creative class jobs—architects, artists, scientists, designers, developers—that drive our information economy. And another reason is that these boundaries are less useful in a digital environment. It’s no wonder then that people use Facebook as a professional networking tool or that businesses hold industry conferences on Second Life.

There are many reasons not to introduce playfulness into a digital product or service. But if we keep users focused solely on getting things done—and not on having fun while doing it—we’ll miss an opportunity to realize the full potential digital products can afford. We need not be designing a game or a children’s product to leverage the creativity and imagination of our users.

As applications evolve, all other factors being equal, people flock to the ones that are more fun to use—the ones that engage them. So, unless your application is indispensable—and even if it is—if it’s deadly boring, its days are numbered. Ultimately, it’s better if people spend time with our digital products because they want to, not because they have to.