How did we get to this point? Most of the emails we receive are useless to us, but paradoxically, that fact may be partly to blame for our feeling compelled to read them. In animal experiments, famed psychologist B. F. Skinner and his colleague C. B. Ferster showed that random reinforcement is far better than regular reinforcement in modifying behaviour. If a pigeon gets food every 100th time it presses a button, it will usually keep pressing. But if the reward comes randomly—sometimes after 50 presses and sometimes after 150—the pigeon will press with much more vigour, even after the rewards are removed entirely. Email does something similar. From time to time we get a very important message, so when we see new mail waiting, we are compelled to read it in the hope it might be something wonderful, even though it usually winds up being unimportant.

We also let ourselves be gamed every day by one of the oldest technologies of all: the calendar. Because it displays our nonscheduled time as empty space, our calendar apps encourage us to pack our days with events. Think how differently we’d interact with our calendars if the default was for time slots not to be empty—if, instead, they were pre-populated with tasks like thinking, writing, and planning. We’d be far less likely to neglect the opportunity costs: Every time we accept an obligation, it would be clear that we are giving something up.

Another calendar problem is related to what behavioural economists Gal Zauberman and John Lynch call “resource slack.” Their research has shown that when people estimate future time and money, we are overly optimistic about how much flexibility (slack) we’ll have. But we’re even more unrealistic about time than money. Lynch, who was my dissertation adviser, used to give me this advice: When someone asks you to do something in a year, ask yourself whether you’d accept if it were happening in the next two weeks. Based on our calendar, it looks as if we will have nothing do a year from now. In reality, though, our typical week next year will look a lot like this week.

But until my calendar starts to simulate that, I’ll likely keep surrendering my days to stuff I never should have scheduled.

Dan Ariely (@danariely) is a professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University. He is the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality.

The thriving field of behavioural economics has begun to codify these mental weaknesses in terms of social, cognitive and emotional factors. Drawing from the insights of psychology, behavioural economists (such as Dan Ariely, Robert Cialdini, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons) have explained why we buy more things at 99p rather than £1 (the left-digit effect), why we commit to memberships of clubs and other organisations that we’ll never use or attend (optimism bias), why we attribute more value to things we own than things we do not (endowment effect) and why we don’t return purchases nearly as often as we perhaps should (post-purchase rationalisation).

Knowledge of human behaviour is now being used by the giants of the web, from Amazon and Apple to Groupon and Zynga, to keep us coming back to their websites, playing their games and buying their products and services.

Amazon

Amazon has mastered eliminating small frictions, which in turn radically alters decisions and behaviour. For millions of people, Amazon is the default purchasing solution because it has all our credit card and address details on file. Amazon has removed the pain of retyping these details each time we make a purchase. This may not sound like much since many other websites also allow us to save our details, but during the few seconds in which we make our buying decisions, when we are not thinking very deeply, the barrier to entering that data seems too forbidding and we default to Amazon.

That’s not the only friction that Amazon has eliminated, they’ve created smart solutions to the problem of shipping, which has always been one of the biggest psychological hurdles to buying online. The first is Super Saver delivery, which is free in the UK if dispatching to UK locations. This option often tempts customers to add an extra item to their order.

The second, more interesting shipping mechanism is Amazon Prime. For an upfront fee of £49 per year, you get free next-day delivery on the majority of items. Knowing that one shop has free shipping compared to another, makes us less likely to shop elsewhere and because the barrier of shipping is removed, we’re more likely to impulse buy. Furthermore, because investment in shipping is essentially made upfront, we try to offset the investment by purchasing more.

Apple

If, like millions of other people, you’re an Apple customer, you may have noticed that email receipts for your purchases don’t arrive immediately after you’ve made the purchase. Whilst the delay could be related to Apple batch-processing transactions, there is an important psychological benefit to the company: the delay reduces the pain of paying and hence the potential for customers to request refunds.

The mechanism of the transaction remains the same, money is still debited from your credit card, but by not receiving a receipt immediately, the payment is decoupled from consumption and the pain of paying, however small the value may be.

It’s not all bad news for the consumer. Apple made the mistake of allowing apps to sell too cheaply or even for free through the AppStore. There’s an economic phenomenon called anchoring, which occurs when people overly rely on a specific piece of information to govern their thought-process. Once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward adjusting or interpreting other information to reflect the “anchored” information. Once a price point is set, it’s extremely difficult to displace the anchor. iPhone and iPad apps take many hours of work to design and build, but on the AppStore, the expectation now is that they can’t cost more than £4.99, whilst most should cost £0.69. The pull of free is just too strong—dragging down what people will pay for everything else.

Facebook

What has become increasingly clear is that the Facebook actively develops features that challenge our limited ability for self-control, since that is what will get us to come back again and again.

Much of Facebook’s genius revolves around the Wall: a public space that we curate but that other people can add to. Within the universe of the site, where everyone is a “friend”, you feel compelled to respond to Wall posts, to comment on others’ posts to yours and to reciprocate by writing on theirs.

We want our Walls to reflect ourselves or certain persona. It’s analogous to the way we curate our belongings, which itself is a window into our personalities.

The psychologist Sam Gosling has shown you can learn more about people from their possessions than from spending time with them. Walls are basically the same—a storefront window to the self.

Groupon

Groupon has not just revolutionised social-buying websites through offering remarkable discounts, but more importantly by removing the embarrassment of coupon shopping.

The stigma of coupon use is real and broad-based. A 2008 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research found that shoppers would describe people standing near coupon users, not to mention the coupon users themselves, as “cheap” or “poor”. With Groupon, by contrast, the social acceptability is baked into the premise – into the name, even. The perception of crowd behaviour can be a powerful motivator when it comes to modifying people’s behaviour.

Groupon also uses time constraints to further influence behaviour. Consumers have one day to decide whether to buy a coupon. Usually, when we don’t buy something, we have the opportunity to go back and buy it later. But with Groupon, our choice becomes explicit. If we don’t buy the coupon now, we’ll never be able to buy it. Presented with that choice, many customers will consider how much they might regret the choice not to buy. And because people hate feeling regret, they become more inclined to buy it now. Amazon do a similar think by alerting the buyer to the fact that there are only n-number of items left, whilst “bricks and mortar” stores such as Zara regularly update their clothes range to drive demand.

Lovefilm

Lovefilm’s business model is based upon the simple premise: people hate late fees. With the traditional video shop model, customers had a simple choice: accumulate late fees or return the unwatched film. Added to this, traditional shops often only stocked a finite amount of “blockbuster” movies. Lovefilm not only resolved the late fee issue by allowing customers to return films whenever they wanted, but also created a long tail of films; and exhaustive collection from which each customer could assemble a queue.

In practice though, Lovefilm customers end up watching fewer films than they might have expected. Why? One reason is that Lovefilm forces us to choose based on what we think we want to see in the future; and we’re bad at predicting our future habits. This isn’t bad for Lovefilm since it is based upon a subscription model, so it saves on postage whilst boosting profits.

The future for Lovefilm will be in the streaming business, much like Netflix does in the US. With streaming, consumers will no longer need to predict what they want to watch in the future. Instead, watching films becomes an on demand service; we’re paying for the right to watch any film at any time, regardless of whether that is what we end up doing.

Twitter

Much like with Facebook, users want to display a self that is somewhere between their real-life self and how they would like to be perceived, which creates a substantial motivation for constant monitoring and updates to their status list and Wall.

Perhaps the most addictive feature for both Twitter and Facebook is that it allows us to enhance our status relatively cheaply, in a way that was not possible 5 years ago, whilst also providing the ability to share; we get tremendous social capital from being seen as generous and as someone whom other people mention.

Zynga

People become emotionally invested in things they’ve built or created. This emotional investment leads people to value their own possessions or creations irrationally high. The longer the emotional investment, the higher the value. Dan Areily dubs this the “Ikea effect” in honour of how your rickety Swedish bookshelf seems perfect after you’ve put hours of frustrating work into assembling it.

This emotional investment is exactly what Zynga uses to great success with FarmVille, CityVille and other social games. Once someone takes a little time to start building a farm, they become invested in maintain it and hence value it more highly. The more complex and time-consuming the task, the more we fall in love with the creation (assuming the appropriate level of reward) and the more we become engrossed in the game.

The compulsion to create is reinforced by social interactions. Much of the action in these games is about reciprocity: people give you useful things and you’re expected to respond in kind. Reciprocity is a powerful motivator. When someone does us good, we want to return the favour; in FarmVille that translates into spending more and more time playing the game.

Further reading:

• Journal of Behavioural Decision Making – Mixing virtue and vice: combining the immediacy effect and the diversification heuristic
• Journal of Consumer Research – Stigma by Association in Coupon Redemption: Looking Cheap because of Others
• Journal of Marketing Science – Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products
• Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling
• Foundations of Human Sociality – Measuring social norms and preferences using experimental games: A guide for social scientists by Colin Camerer and Ernst Fehr (PDF 150KB, pp.40)

Products designed with appreciation for these natural principles will tend to be better received and more easily utilised by the general public. But what are some of these elements, laws and principles? Below is a list of 11 to whet your appetite.

Occam’s Razor

Occam’s razor (also spelled Ockham’s razor) states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (law of succinctness): all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one. One consequence of this methodology is the idea that the simplest or most obvious explanation of several competing ones is the one that should be preferred until it is proven wrong.

But how does this relate to design? 37Signals’ book Getting Real provides a good overview: deliver just what customers need and eliminate anything they don’t. Start with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. Begin with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong. It’s about keeping things simple, iterating the design and lowering the cost of change; it is about launching, tweaking and constantly improving.

Hick’s Law

Hick’s Law, or the Hick–Hyman Law, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has. The Hick’s Law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick’s Law is known as the rate of gain of information.

Hick’s Law can be expressed with the following equation:

This law has implications in areas such as website navigation and getting people to take action. Since the time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases, the more options you offer, the less likely any one of those options will be taken.

Hick’s Law can be visualised with the following image:

The conclusion from Hick’s law is to provide less options or present only those options that are necessary or required to complete the given task. Instead of a long list of menu options, think about how you can group them into as few high level choices as possible. Present those few options in common places like navigation and only present more options as someone digs deeper into one level of categorisation. 6 – 8 main navigational links is a general guide.

Fitts’ Law

Fitts’ Law is a model of human movement in human–computer interaction and ergonomics, which states that the speed and accuracy with which a user can select an on-screen object depends on the size of the object and how far the user has to move the pointer. Fitts’ Law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device.

Fitts’ Law can be visualised with the following image:

Fitts’ Law is expressed with the following equation:

Where: T = Time, a = start/stop time, b = speed of device, D = distance, and W = width of target, or allowable error of tolerance.

Fitts’ Law has implications for designers: features that require user interaction (e.g., links and buttons) should be as large as practically possible given display constraints and that frequently used features should be grouped near one another to minimise the distance that the user has to move the cursor to activate them.

Gestalt

Gestalt psychology is a theory of mind and brain positing that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analogue, with self-organising tendencies.

The Gestalt effect is the form-generating capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

The key principles of Gestalt systems are emergence, reification, multi-stability and invariance.

• Emergence – the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules.
• Reification – the constructive or generative aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.
• Multi-stability – the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations.
• Invariance – the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognised independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features.

Prägnanz

Prägnanz is the fundamental principle of perceptual segregation proposed by Gestalt psychologists. It states that during visual perception, the best, simplest and most stable shape of any possibilities will be perceived.

Prägnanz is defined by six laws:

1. Law of Closure – the mind may experience elements it does not perceive through sensation, in order to complete a regular figure (that is, to increase regularity).
2. Law of Similarity – the mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. These similarities may depend upon relationships of form, colour, size or brightness.
3. Law of Proximity – spatial or temporal grouping of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality.
4. Law of Symmetry (figure ground relationships) – symmetrical images are perceived collectively, even in spite of distance.
5. Law of Continuity – the mind continues visual, auditory and kinetic patterns.
6. Law of Common Fate – elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit.

These laws can and should be used in user interface design. The laws of similarity and proximity can, for example, be used as guides for placing radio buttons.

Miller’s Law

Miller’s Law is based upon theories of communication. The law instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.

The Magical Number 7, Plus or Minus Two

This law, also known as Miller’s Law, argues that the number of objects, or chunks, an average human can hold in working memory is 7±2. Later research on short-term memory and working memory revealed that memory span is not a constant even when measured in terms of a number of chunks. The number of chunks a human can recall immediately after presentation depends on the category of chunks used (e.g., memory span is around seven for digits, around six for letters, and around five for words), and even on features of the chunks within a category. For instance, memory span is lower for long words than it is for short words. In general, memory span for verbal contents (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak the contents aloud.

Fibonacci Sequence

The Fibonacci Sequence is a list of numbers is created by repeatedly adding the sums of the last two digits. It begins with 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and so on. What is fascinating is that this sequence appears repeatedly in nature, in tree branches, leaves on stems, in a wide variety of plants and the reproduction pattern of honeybees.

The Fibonacci sequence can be described as the function:

This is not the easiest function to punch out on your calculator but the concept is simple enough. You can easily determine the next or previous number in the sequence with a little old fashioned glance at the Fibonacci string.

The Fibonacci Sequence is often visualised in design with the following diagram:

The Fibonacci Sequence is closely related to the Golden Ratio.

Golden Ratio

The Golden Ratio is a term used in both mathematics and art. Two quantities are said to be in the golden ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. The golden ratio is an irrational mathematical constant, approximately 1.6180339887. Other names frequently used for the golden ratio are the golden section and the golden mean.

The following figure can be used to express the geometric relationship that defines the constant:

But for those of you who are mathematically inclined, this is the ratio expressed algebraically:

The Golden Ratio describes the most aesthetically pleasing proportionate shapes and designs. A Fibonacci spiral, created by drawing circular arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Fibonacci tiling (this one uses squares of sizes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34), can be used to plan your design.

As a designer, you can use this ratio to place the elements on your pages to create mini golden ratio rectangles, which will be pleasing to the eye. It can be used for captions, text flowing beside images, advertising space and navigation buttons and menus. It is worth bearing this ratio in mind when creating rectangles for your pages.

You can read more about the Golden Ratio on the Smashing Magazine website.

Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or the four intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centering the subject would.

In most cases it is neither possible nor useful to use all four points to highlight the most important functions or navigation options in a design. However, you can use some of them (usually one or two) to properly place the most important message or functionality of the site. The left upper corner is usually the strongest one, since users scan web-sites according to the F-shape.

You can read more about the Rule of Thirds on the Smashing Magazine website.

Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle, also known as the “80-20 rule” and the “Law of the Vital Few”, states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Use the 80-20 rule to focus your resources in order to realise greater results. Identify what 20 percent of a products features are used 80 percent of the time and concentrate design and testing efforts on those resources. Or identify what critical 20 percent of a product’s features are responsible for 80 percent of the revenue and concentrate on that.

The 80-20 rule can help you decide what to redesign, what parts of a product or your time to downplay, what to throw away, or where to invest your scarce resources. It can help you resist efforts to correct and optimize designs beyond the critical 20 percent as more would yield diminishing returns.

Have you have discovered other guidelines that can be incorporated into your successful design strategy? If so, please feel free to post a comment.

Game Dynamics are constructs of rules and feedback loops intended to produce enjoyable game-play. They are the building blocks that can be applied and combined to gamify any non-game context.

Early examples of gamification are based on rewarding points to people who share experiences on location-based platforms such as Facebook’s “Place” feature, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Gamification is used by marketers and website product managers as a tool for customer engagement and encouraging desirable website usage behaviour. Gamification is readily applicable to increasing engagement on sites built on social network services. One site, DevHub, increased the number of users who completed their online tasks from 10% to 80% after adding gamification elements.

Below are listed 47 game dynamics. The challenge comes from taking these mechanics and employing them in a website setting. If you have some good examples, please feel free to post a comment.

1. Achievement – A virtual or physical representation of having accomplished something. Achievements can be easy, difficult, surprising and funny and can be accomplished alone or as a group. Achievements are often viewed as rewards in and of themselves.
   Example: A badge (Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah), a level (Tiny Wings and Angry Birds), a reward (Fruit Ninja), points (Doodle Jump and Pac-Man), really anything defined as a reward can be a reward.
2. Appointment Dynamic – A dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action. Appointment dynamics are often deeply related to interval based reward schedules or avoidance dynamics.
   Example: Cafe World and Farmville where if you return at a set time to do something you get something good, and if you don’t something bad happens.
3. Avoidance – The act of inducing player behaviour not by giving a reward, but by not instituting a punishment. Produces consistent level of activity, timed around the schedule.
   Example: Press a lever every 30 seconds to not get shocked.
4. Behavioural Contrast – The theory defining how behaviour can shift greatly based on changed expectations.
   Example: A monkey presses a lever and is given lettuce. The monkey is happy and continues to press the lever. Then it gets a grape one time. The monkey is delighted. The next time it presses the lever it gets lettuce again. Rather than being happy, as it was before, it goes ballistic throwing the lettuce at the experimenter. (In some experiments, a second monkey is placed in the cage, but tied to a rope so it can’t access the lettuce or lever. After the grape reward is removed, the first monkey beats up the second monkey even though it obviously had nothing to do with the removal. The anger is truly irrational.)
5. Behavioural Momentum – The tendency of players to keep doing what they have been doing.
   Example: From Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 talk: “I have spent ten hours playing Farmville. I am a smart person and wouldn’t spend 10 hours on something unless it was useful. Therefore this must be useful, so I can keep doing it.”
6. Blissful Productivity – The idea that playing in a game makes you happier working hard, than you would be relaxing. Essentially, we’re optimised as human beings by working hard, and doing meaningful and rewarding work.
   Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk wherein she discusses how World of Warcraft players play on average 22 hours per week (a part time job), often after a full days work. They’re willing to work hard, perhaps harder than in real life, because of their blissful productivity in the game world.
7. Cascading Information Theory (also known as Progressive Disclosure on the Web) – The theory that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.
   Example: Showing basic actions first, unlocking more as you progress through levels. Making building on SCVNGR a simple but staged process to avoid information overload.
8. Chain Schedules – the practice of linking a reward to a series of contingencies. Players tend to treat these as simply the individual contingencies. Unlocking one step in the contingency is often viewed as an individual reward by the player.
   Example: Kill 10 orcs to get into the dragons cave, every 30 minutes the dragon appears.
9. Communal Discovery – The game dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a riddle, a problem or a challenge. Immensely viral and very fun.
   Example: DARPA Network Challenge; a competition that explores the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilisation. The cottage industries that appear around McDonald’s monopoly to find “Boardwalk”.
10. Companion Gaming – Games that can be played across multiple platforms
    Example: Games that be played on iPhone, Facebook, XBox with completely seamless cross platform game-play.
11. Contingency – The problem that the player must overcome in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: 10 orcs block your path
12. Countdown – The dynamic in which players are only given a certain amount of time to do something. This will create an activity graph that causes increased initial activity increasing frenetically until time runs out, which is a forced extinction.
    Example: Bejewelled Blitz with 30 seconds to get as many points as you can. Bonus rounds. Timed levels
13. Cross Situational Leader-boards – This occurs when one ranking mechanism is applied across multiple (unequal and isolated) gaming scenarios. Players often perceive that these ranking scenarios are unfair as not all players were presented with an “equal” opportunity to win.
    Example: Players are arbitrarily sent into one of three paths. The winner is determined by the top scorer overall (i.e. across the paths). Since the players can only do one path (and can’t pick), they will perceive inequity in the game scenario and get upset.
14. Disincentives – a game element that uses a penalty (or altered situation) to induce behavioural shift.
    Example: losing health points, amazon’s checkout line removing all links to tunnel the buyer to purchase, speeding traps.
15. Endless Games – Games that do not have an explicit end. Most applicable to casual games that can refresh their content or games where a static (but positive) state is a reward of its own.
    Example: Farmville (static state is its own victory), SCVNGR (challenges constantly are being built by the community to refresh content).
16. Envy – The desire to have what others have. In order for this to be effective seeing what other people have (voyeurism) must be employed.
    Example: My friend has this item and I want it!
17. Epic Meaning – players will be highly motivated if they believe they are working to achieve something great, something awe-inspiring, something bigger than themselves.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk where she discusses World of Warcraft’s ongoing story line and “epic meaning” that involves each individual has motivated players to participate outside the game and create the second largest wiki in the world to help them achieve their individual quests and collectively their epic meanings.
18. Extinction – Extinction is the term used to refer to the action of stopping providing a reward. This tends to create anger in players as they feel betrayed by no longer receiving the reward they have come to expect. It generally induces negative behavioural momentum.
    Example: Killing 10 orcs no longer gets you a level up.
19. Fixed Interval Reward Schedules – Fixed interval schedules provide a reward after a fixed amount of time, say 30 minutes. This tends to create a low engagement after a reward, and then gradually increasing activity until a reward is given, followed by another lull in engagement.
    Example: Farmville, wait 30 minutes, crops have appeared.
20. Fixed Ratio Reward Schedules – A fixed ratio schedule provides rewards after a fixed number of actions. This creates cyclical nadirs of engagement (because the first action will not create any reward so incentive is low) and then bursts of activity as the reward gets closer and closer.
    Example: Kill 20 ships, get a level up, visit five locations, get a badge.
21. Free Lunch – A dynamic in which a player feels that they are getting something for free due to someone else having done work. It’s critical that work is perceived to have been done (just not by the player in question) to avoid breaching trust in the scenario. The player must feel that they’ve “lucked” into something.
    Example: Groupon. By virtue of 100 other people having bought the deal, you get it cheaply. There is no sketchiness because you recognise work has been done (100 people are spending money) but you yourself didn’t have to do it.
22. Fun Once, Fun Always – The concept that an action in enjoyable to repeat all the time. Generally this has to do with simple actions. There is often also a limitation to the total level of enjoyment of the action.
    Example: the theory behind the check-in everywhere and the check-in and the default challenges on SCVNGR.
23. Interval Reward Schedules – Interval based reward schedules provide a reward after a certain amount of time. There are two flavours: variable and fixed.
    Example: Wait n minutes, collect rent.
24. Lottery – A game dynamic in which the winner is determined solely by chance. This creates a high level of anticipation. The fairness is often suspect, however winners will generally continue to play indefinitely while losers will quickly abandon the game, despite the random nature of the distinction between the two.
    Example: Many forms of gambling, scratch tickets.
25. Loyalty – The concept of feeling a positive sustained connection to an entity leading to a feeling of partial ownership. Often reinforced with a visual representation.
    Example: Fealty in World of Warcraft, achieving status at physical places (mayorship, being on the wall of favourite customers).
26. Meta Game – a game which exists layered within another game. These generally are discovered rather than explained (lest they cause confusion) and tend to appeal to ~2% of the total game-playing audience. They are dangerous as they can induce confusion (if made too overt) but are powerful as they’re greatly satisfying to those who find them.
    Example: hidden questions / achievements within World of Warcraft that require you to do special (and hard to discover) activities as you go through other quests.
27. Micro Leader-boards – The rankings of all individuals in a micro-set. Often great for distributed game dynamics where you want many micro-competitions or desire to induce loyalty.
    Example: Be the top scorers at Joe’s bar this week and get a free appetiser.
28. Modifiers – An item that when used affects other actions. Generally modifiers are earned after having completed a series of challenges or core functions.
    Example: A x2 modifier that doubles the points on the next action you take.
29. Moral Hazard of Game Play – The risk that by rewarding people manipulatively in a game you remove the actual moral value of the action and replace it with an ersatz game-based reward. The risk that by providing too many incentives to take an action, the incentive of actually enjoying the action taken is lost. The corollary to this is that if the points or rewards are taken away, then the person loses all motivation to take the (initially fun on its own) action.
    Example: Paraphrased from Jesse Schell “If I give you points every time you brush your teeth, you’ll stop brushing your teeth because it’s good for you and then only do it for the points. If the points stop flowing, your teeth will decay.”
30. Ownership – The act of controlling something, having it be your property.
    Example: Ownership is interesting on a number of levels, from taking over places, to controlling a slot, to simply owning popularity by having a digital representation of many friends.
31. Pride – the feeling of ownership and joy at an accomplishment.
    Example: I have ten badges. I own them. They are mine. There are many like them, but these are mine. Hooray.
32. Privacy – The concept that certain information is private, not for public distribution. This can be a demotivator (I won’t take an action because I don’t want to share this) or a motivator (by sharing this I reinforce my own actions).
    Example: Scales the publish your daily weight onto Twitter (these are real and are proven positive motivator for staying on your diet). Or having your location publicly broadcast anytime you do anything (which is invasive and can should be avoided).
33. Progression – A dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemised tasks.
    Example: LinkedIn uses a progress bar to motivate you to complete your user profile, whilst Mendeley combines the progress bar with a statement suggesting what content needs to be completed: “Fill out your research profile to increase your impact in the Mendeley network and to enable your colleagues to find you.” Levelling up from Paladin level 1 to Paladin level 60.
34. Ratio Reward Schedules – Ratio schedules provide a reward after a number of actions. There are two flavours: variable and fixed.
    Example: Kill 10 orcs, get a power up.
35. Real-time vs. Delayed Mechanics – Realtime information flow is uninhibited by delay. Delayed information is only released after a certain interval.
    Example: Realtime scores cause instant reaction (gratification or demotivation). Delayed information causes ambiguity which can incentivise more action due to the lack of certainty of ranking.
36. Reinforcer – The reward given if the expected action is carried out in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: Receiving a level up after killing 10 orcs.
37. Response – The expected action from the player in the three part paradigm of reward schedules.
    Example: the player takes the action to kill 10 orcs.
38. Reward Schedules – the time-frame and delivery mechanisms through which rewards (points, prizes, level ups) are delivered. Three main parts exist in a reward schedule; contingency, response and reinforcer.
    Example: Getting a level up for killing 10 orcs, clearing a row in Tetris, getting fresh crops in Farmville
39. Rolling Physical Goods – A physical good (one with real value) that can be won by anyone on an ongoing basis as long as they meet some characteristic. However, that characteristic rolls from player to player.
    Example: Top scorer deals, mayor deals.
40. Shell Game – a game in which the player is presented with the illusion of choice but is actually in a situation that guides them to the desired outcome of the operator.
    Example: 3 Card Monty, lotteries, gambling.
41. Social Fabric of Games – the idea that people like one another better after they’ve played games with them, have a higher level of trust and a great willingness to work together.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk where she suggests that it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone because you need them to spend their time with you, play by the same rules, shoot for the same goals.
42. Status – The rank or level of a player. Players are often motivated by trying to reach a higher level or status.
    Example: White Paladin level 20 in World of Warcraft.
43. Urgent Optimism – Extreme self motivation. The desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.
    Example: From Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk. The idea that in proper games an “epic win” or just “win” is possible and therefore always worth acting for.
44. Variable Interval Reward Schedules – Variable interval reward schedules provide a reward after a roughly consistent amount of time. This tends to create a reasonably high level of activity over time, as the player could receive a reward at any time but never the burst as created under a fixed schedule. This system is also more immune to the nadir right after the receiving of a reward, but also lacks the zenith of activity before a reward in unlocked due to high levels of ambiguity.
    Example: Wait roughly 30 minutes, a new weapon appears. Check back as often as you want but that won’t speed it up. Generally players are bad at realising that.
45. Variable Ratio Reward Schedules – A variable ratio reward schedule provides rewards after a roughly consistent but unknown amount of actions. This creates a relatively high consistent rate of activity (as there could always be a reward after the next action) with a slight increase as the expected reward threshold is reached, but never the huge burst of a fixed ratio schedule. It’s also more immune to nadirs in engagement after a reward is achieved.
    Example: Kill 20 ships, get a level up. Visit a couple locations (roughly five) get a badge
46. Viral Game Mechanics – A game element that requires multiple people to play (or that can be played better with multiple people).
    Example: Farmville making you more successful in the game if you invite your friends, the social check-in.
47. Virtual Items – Digital prizes, rewards, objects found or taken within the course of a game. Often these can be traded or given away.
    Example: Gowalla’s items, Facebook gifts, badges.

You can read more about “Gamification” on the Gamification Wiki or on the Wikipedia Gamification page.

Inclusive design is where innovation and imagination flourish. Meeting the needs of the widest variety of people does not inhibit creativity. It opens our minds and inspires excellence.

In her article in .net magazine, Sandi Wassmer of Copious explains the ten principles for inclusive web design an overview of which is listed below:

1. Equitable – Be welcoming, don’t discriminate and engage with people. Create different user experiences and make certain they have equally valuable outcomes. Aesthetics matter.
2. Flexible – Provide options. Think who, how, why, what, where and when people will be using your website. Make sure there is choice for diverse users and maintain device independence.
3. Straightforward – Be obvious and not ambiguous. Make sure your website’s features add value, not complexity. Remember, good design is as little design as possible.
4. Perceptible – Don’t assume anything. Make sure your website’s purpose is clear, its content, structure and sequence are meaningful and convey information to all of the senses.
5. Informative – Make sure people know where they are on your website and provide ways for them to find what they’re looking for. Be timely, predictable, uncomplicated and precise.
6. Preventative – Provide easy to follow instructions and gently guide users in interacting with your website. Help them to minimise errors when submitting data, through well considered form design.
7. Tolerant – Handle errors respectfully and indicate precisely what the error is, where it is and how to fix it. Remember to let people know the outcome.
8. Effortless – Don’t make demands or place restrictions on your users. People should not have to work or think hard to find what they want on your website. Ensure it can be used efficiently and effectively.
9. Accommodating – Be approachable, uncluttered and give people room to manoeuvre. Make sure that your website is unobtrusive and can be accessed by different devices of all shapes and sizes.
10. Consistent – Follow standards, guidelines, conventions and best practices. Provide a familiar environment with memorable functionality.

With different devices, configurations, browsers, personal settings and assistive technologies, and no agreement on how to achieve interoperability, web builders must do their best to accommodate the diverse ways people access the internet. Building with this in mind will ensure your visitors have a quality experience.

Inclusive design enables us to create great, meaningful, on-brand internet experiences for the widest audience possible. However, inclusive design is also a new way of thinking, and its overarching aims may not mirror those of your organisation or clients. Change takes time, so you may not be able to do everything at once. If you just start thinking about accessibility and plan your projects with users in mind, you’ll be on the right path. There will be trade-offs and tough decisions, but this is where inclusive design really comes to the fore. It challenges us to hone our craft and fosters real creativity and innovation.

What if a business offered those rewards to their customers?

In his book Game On: Energize Your Business with Social Media Games, Jon Radoff identifies 43 things that customers think are fun.

1. Recognising Patterns – Anything from visual patterns, motion patterns, strategic patterns or mathematical patterns.
2. Collecting – Collections communicate status, suggest organisation, lead to rewards, represent wealth and are mementos.
3. Finding Random Treasures – Like winning a jackpot or slot machine, finding shells at the beach or opening Cracker Jacks to find a surprise.
4. Achieving a Sense of Completion – Giving players a constant sense of finishing something like progress bars, to-do lists, achievements and levels.
5. Gaining Recognition for Achievements – Achievement systems provide a sense of accomplishment and a chance to be recognised.
6. Creating Order out of Chaos – Sorting, lining things up and classifying give players a sense of control over their environment.
7. Customising Virtual Worlds – People enjoy leaving their mark and place great value on things they’ve made.
8. Gathering Knowledge – Studying and being taught are not fun, but learning is fun because we are naturally curious.
9. Organising Groups of People – Organising groups of people to achieve shared goals is a source of enjoyment.
10. Noting Insider References – Discovering “Easter Eggs” gives player a sense of being a part of the “in crowd.”
11. Being the Centre of Attention – Satisfy the human need for attention by putting the player at the centre of the universe.
12. Experiencing Beauty and Culture – Games feature artwork, music and designs that appeal to the human senses.
13. Romance – Games can provide opportunities for flirting, wooing and building relationships with the opposite sex.
14. Exchanging Gifts – Players enjoy giving gifts to their friends and the act of giving triggers reciprocity.
15. Being a Hero – Playing as the hero appeals to the human desire for power.
16. Being a Villain – It’s about the fantasy of having power without consequences.
17. Being a Wise Old Man – This is typically a high status role that may also touch on the motivator of family.
18. Being a Rebel – The opportunity to flaunt society’s rules while remaining basically good.
19. Being the Magician, a keeper of secret knowledge – People enjoy the thought of knowing something that nobody else knows.
20. Being the Ruler – The chance to be a person with considerable power over other people.
21. Pretending to Live in a Magical Place – Players enjoy imaging being in worlds different than their own.
22. Listening to a Story – Stories appeal to our curiosity about people, places and things.
23. Telling Stories – Games provide an opportunity for players to construct and tell their own unique stories.
24. Predicting the Future – Predicting the future makes people feel smart, in-control and influential.
25. Competition – People enjoy the sense of power that comes from winning.
26. Psychoanalysing – Predicting, guessing or understanding the motivations of others can be a source of fun.
27. Mystery – Striking a balance between revealing a little while holding back the rest can create a fun experience.
28. Mastering a Skill – Increasing one’s mastery without becoming frustrated gives people a sense of flow.
29. Exacting Justice and Revenge – Justice and revenge provide a sense of idealism and tranquility when wrongs are righted.
30. Nurturing – Growing things stems from your motivations for family, saving and power.
31. Excitement – Suspense, horror, competitive action and anticipation help create an addictive, exciting experience.
32. Triumph over Conflict – Resolving conflict provides the player with a sense of victory.
33. Relaxing – Games can create a mental vacation which can lead to tranquility.
34. Experiencing the Freakish or Bizarre – People crave new and unique experiences that are different from their everyday lives.
35. Being Silly – Players enjoy an escape from the serious and mundane.
36. Laughing – People love to laugh, especially with their friends.
37. Being Scared – People enjoy the sensation of danger without the actual danger.
38. Strengthening a Family Relationship – Players enjoy feeling companionship with members of their family.
39. Improving One’s Health – People dislike exercise, but love to feel fit.
40. Imagining a Connection with the Past – Nostalgia is a powerful emotional trigger for good and bad emotions.
41. Exploring a World – Understanding your environment gives you a sense of power and control.
42. Improving Society – Players can satisfy their need to leave the world a better place than when they came into it.
43. Enlightenment – Games provide a way for players to explore decisions and their consequences, leading to greater knowledge.

Adapted from the book Game On: Energize Your Business with Social Media Games by Jon Radoff (pages 108-124)

Professor Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes” and how to apply these understandings. Cialdini’s six “weapons of influence” are as follows:

1. Reciprocation – Reciprocation is the idea that by giving something to someone for free, they will feel obligated to return the favour. This makes them react more favourably to your requests, compelling them into an action they might otherwise ignore. Cialdini often uses the example of Ethiopia providing thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid to Mexico just after the 1985 earthquake, despite Ethiopia suffering from a crippling famine and civil war at the time. Ethiopia had been reciprocating for the diplomatic support Mexico provided when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935.
2. Commitment and Consistency – People are driven to behave consistently with their past actions and statements. Once a person goes on record with a belief or opinion, it can be very difficult for them to take actions that appear to contradict their previously statements, even if the original incentive or motivation is removed. See Cognitive Dissonance
3. Social Proof – When faced with indecision, we often turn to the wisdom of the tribe. Social proof occurs when our actions mimic the actions of our peers. An example of this is when shoppers become overwhelmed or untrusting of elaborate product descriptions and turn instead to user reviews and testimonials to inform purchasing decisions. See conformity, and the Asch Conformity Experiments.
4. Scarcity – Scarcity is making an item appear scarce in order to increase its perceived value and influence a person to pay more for it than its actually worth. It may also cause them to act impulsively, fueled by the fear that it may be gone later.
5. Liking – Whether because of familiarity, attractiveness or association, we unconsciously act much more favorably toward people we find likable. See the Physical Attractiveness Stereotype.
6. Authority – By placing ourselves in a subordinate position, we tend to unquestioningly obey the commands of people in authoritative positions. See the Milgram Experiments of the 1960s.

David Travis of Userfocus elaborates on Cialdini’s weapons of influence, applying the persuasion triggers to web design.

Where to go next

• MINDSPACE: Influencing Behaviour through Public Policy: A series of reports and guides from a UK Government think tank on how to apply these principles to improving public policy.
• Design with Intent: A blog by Dan Lockton, providing many examples of how designers use these kinds of technique to influence behaviour.
• The Nudge blog: A blog by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein that describes many examples of behaviour change based on what they call “change architecture”.

Norman’s approach is based on classical ABC model of attitudes. However, Norman changed the concept to be suitable for application in design. The three dimensions have new names (visceral, behavioural and reflective level) and partially new content. In the book, Norman shows that design of most objects are perceived on all three levels (dimensions). Therefore a good design should address all three levels.

• The Visceral level is obtained through intuition rather than from reasoning or observation. This level is influenced significantly by appearance, texture and sound of objects.
• The Behavioural level refers to the actions or reactions of a person, usually in relation to the environment, to an object or person. Behaviour can be conscious or unconscious, overt or covert and voluntary or involuntary. This level is about functionality and is influenced by pleasure and effectiveness of use (accessibility and usability).
• The Reflective level refers to the capability of quiet thought or contemplation. This level is influenced strongly by self-image, satisfaction, memory and the meaning of things. This level becomes more important as products mature.

Norman postulates that these three dimensions are interwoven through any successful design and that it is not possible to have design without all three.

The three dimensions interweave both emotions and cognition. Emotion is a necessary part of life, affecting how you feel, how you behave and you think. Without emotions, Norman suggests any decision making would be impaired. Emotion passes judgement and gives continual feedback allowing you to make valuable decisions and is therefore key in any approach to successful design.