E-mail games, slots, and customer experience
Thursday, May 13, 2004
by Mark Hurst
Get Good Experience by e-mail: e-mail update@goodexperience.com
One of the formative experiences of my career came in 1995, while I
worked at Yoyodyne Entertainment, an early Internet marketing firm.
We were running e-mail trivia games for tens of thousands of
Internet users.
The important metric was the response rate, the percentage of
players who would answer the trivia question in a given round.
Advertisers were obviously interested in a higher response rate,
since it meant that more players opened the game e-mails. Thus we
set out to create the best possible experience for the game players:
a better experience would mean more player participation and happier
advertisers.
We used as a guide the two most successful trivia games at that
time: the board game Trivial Pursuit, and the TV game show Jeopardy.
What distinguishes each of these (among other things) is the quality
of the writing in each trivia question. Questions are just hard
enough that you have to think about the answer; and interesting
enough that you feel like you should know the answer (or would like
to).
With those examples in mind, we went ahead creating the best
possible trivia game experience: carefully writing each question,
making sure it was just hard enough, sometimes witty, and often with
a little twist. As we ran those games, a few thousand people would
sign up, and a modest percentage - say, 30% - would answer the
question in any given round.
As Yoyodyne got busier, we had less and less time to write each
game's questions. Finally, one day, we launched a game that had very
little effort put into the questions - a rush job, as I recall. The
questions were factually correct, but there was no witty writing, no
twist, and the questions were really easy to answer.
When the game ran, we were surprised to see that the response rate,
instead of hovering around 30%, actually exceeded 60%. We had put
less work into crafting the experience, and there were more
players who wanted to participate.
In hindsight it's obvious to me what was going on, but at the time I
was stumped. Why would players prefer the worse experience to the
better one?
After observing users' behavior more, I eventually realized that I
had it all wrong. Players wanted something different from what we
were creating for them. In particular, users wanted two things from
their e-mail game experience:
1. POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT: Users wanted to be told that they got the
answer right, and that they were winning.
2. NO INVESTMENT: Users did not want to pay for that positive
reinforcement in any way. They didn't want to think, work, get up
from their chair, or otherwise make any effort to get the reward.
(Even if a game asked an easy question that required a couple
minutes' research online or in an encyclopedia, the response rate
would drop dramatically.)
These two observations were an early hint to me that users wanted
something online that most companies weren't providing: a quick,
easy experience that provided value without troubling the user. I
started Creative Good less than two years later to help companies
create the good experience that users wanted.
That early case study came to mind as I read "The Tug of the
Newfangled Slot Machines," an article in the New York Times magazine
this past weekend. It describes the designers, and design processes,
behind slot machines. Slots are the darling of the gambling
industry, bringing in $30 billion dollars per year, after payouts.
It's a hugely sucessful business.
Slot machine designers hone the interface to maximize the revenue
from each unit. The article quotes a psychiatry professor calling
the designs "brilliant":
The people who are making these machines are using all the
behavioral techniques to increase the probability that the
behavior of gambling will reoccur.
A player confirms that it works:
When I asked one elderly man to explain the allure of playing
slots, he replied, "I don't have to think."
Here again are the same two observations: positive reinforcement
with no investment. A slot machine plays music, flashes lights, and
pays out small sums to convince players that they're being rewarded.
Players aren't asked for any investment of mental, or even physical
energy - they can press a button to avoid pulling a lever. And if
users swipe a debit card instead of inserting coins, they can more
easily forget the all-too-real financial investment.
I respect people's different opinions about gambling. I have friends who
genuinely find it entertaining and experience no problems as a
result - but I have to admit that walking through a casino full of
slot machines is pretty close to my idea of hell. It feels empty and
depressing.
Thus I find it ironic, and a little sad, that gambling is the
industry reaping the benefits of some of the best experience
designers in the world. Look at thisisbroken.com; expertise like
that could be applied in a lot of areas outside gambling.
How, then, do I justify my belief in better customer experience?
After all, the process of making things easier and more accessible
is helping to spread the slot machine, hardly the engine of social
and economic improvement.
My answer is that customer experience work is, essentially, a
technology. It's a process and perspective that reliably and
measurably improves business. And like any technology, it can be
used for better or worse ends. It's up to practitioners to determine
their own purpose, and what ends they want to serve. As for me, I'm
happy to increase the metrics of most businesses - but slot machines
are not among them.
NYT article on slots (online for free until May 15, 2004)
Gel 2004 speaker Bob Roberts on purpose
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