Beautiful Interfaces

A fascinating thing I’ve been noticing lately (and even more since the tragic earthquake in Haiti) is the use of social gaming to encourage people to donate. Mainly I’m thinking of Zynga, which raised $1 million for the World Food Programme in only 2 days, by allowing people to purchase special virtual goods in games like Farmville and donating the proceeds from those products to the cause.

I think this is brilliant, because it combines the best features of both donating and purchasing. You know that the money you give is going to help others who need it; and you also get something directly in return. (In the case of Farmville, you get access to a special crop with particularly lucrative stats, and you also get a special flag so you can show off your generosity to your friends.) This works because the marginal cost of virtual goods is effectively zero, so none of that money is required to compensate the producers, assuming that the fixed costs have been covered.

While Zynga is very much a for-profit company, seeing the effectiveness of their charity drive got me thinking about what it would take to create a game that was specifically designed to encourage people to maximize donations to a charitable cause. I think it would tap into a lot of the same traits that I discussed in my post about Farmville’s psychological hooks, but in a way that ties in-game rewards to a specific real-life behavior: that of donating money.

Let’s take the example of Donors Choose. Since they focus on primary and secondary education, if I were creating a game for them I would base it around a simulation of a school. Like Zynga’s games, my game would be tapped into some social platform like Facebook, to make it easy for people to “visit” and share with their friends. (The ability to easily check out other people’s performance is crucial; the competition and “showing off” that result are the hook upon which much of the desired behavior hangs.)

Maybe you start out in a one-room schoolhouse, with 10 students. You are given a teacherlike avatar that you can customize to look like yourself, to create a sense of ownership, and your goal in the game is to make your school a success.

The main aspect of the game is this: as you give money to various projects through Donors Choose, you get more students in your school, and you also get points that you can spend on virtual goods related to different subject areas.

So, for example, if you donate $100 to a science project, you get 1000 points that you can spend on installing a virtual science lab in your virtual school and buying things like awesome robots, model rockets, telescopes, and so on. If you donate $100 to an English project, you can buy fancy bookcases, statues of Shakespeare, comfy chairs to read in, and so on. (All very cutely and appealingly drawn, of course.) Basically, every dollar that you donate allows you to make your virtual school more and more luxe. (Think Harvard + Hogwarts + a sci-fi novel.)

This makes it very easy to show off your generosity to others, just like Farmville’s special Haiti flag does. And since we know that looking good to other people is one of the main reasons people donate, this should tap into that urge to show off, to appear generous, to make yourself look good. (While benefiting real people along the way, of course.)

Second, your school gets graded in all of these different areas, which roll up into an overall grade for you, the teacher. You start out with an F, and as you enhance different areas of your school, your grade goes up. This allows you to measure yourself against your friends in the game, and creates a leveling system. Your grade is tied to what virtual goods you have access to, with cooler or better virtual goods reserved for those with a better grade. This creates a virtuous cycle, where donating money lets you level up and gain access to better goods, which can be acquired by donating more money, and repeat.

Third, to encourage stickiness and a high level of engagement, there are regular tasks that you can do to earn a small number of points, like grading papers and talking to kids. (Hey, it’s no weirder than people virtually plowing fields and milking goats!) The number of points you can earn from these should be kept fairly low, below the threshold needed to buy a lot of the really cool items. And if you don’t check in regularly, there should be some form of consequence; perhaps your students’ morale drops, and therefore your grade goes down. Creating the potential for loss triggers loss aversion, which is such a powerful instinctive force.

Fourth, each real-life classroom that you donate to can select and send you a special gift for your virtual school. These should be really cool premium items that aren’t available any other way. This creates a very direct relationship of mutual benefit: give money, and get this rare item in return. (You should also be able to post their thank-you letters and photos in a prominent place in your virtual school, for other people to read.)

This is just a start on what such a game would be, but I think it’s a really interesting approach. Rather than denying or bemoaning the various blind spots, biases, and quirks of the human brain, I think it’s interesting to design ways that we can exploit those quirks and biases to accomplish something good.

I. Privacy and Context

People act differently in different contexts. Everyone does this. You speak to your boss differently than to your girlfriend. You say different things at a football game than you would in church. We have different behaviors that get cued by things we see, and by the behavior of other people around us.

For most people, each website is a different context. Each social network, each app, each thing-that-looks-different with a different name and a different design and a different community and a different culture, each one of these spaces is a different context. And people respond to those contexts differently, just as we do in physical space.

For example: here, I write in a tone that is earnest, somewhat quirky, and slightly academic. On Twitter, I tend towards snarky one-liners.

This was never a problem before Google came along. (And Yahoo, and Bing, and the other search engines. I’m using Google as a shorthand; let’s be honest, it’s the one that you use.)

Before Google came along, there was no way to observe someone separate from their context, aside from physically having them followed. (That tactic, of course, has its own legal issues.) Post-Google, as long as you have a way to link up a person’s identity, you can follow their trail across the internet from the comfort of your chair. And all of those words and images and videos are flattened, stripped of context, and served up on a blue-and-white platter of links.

I usually argue that we should be expecting that, by now. That everyone, by now, should be aware that anything we do or say online could be seen by anybody, at any time. But when I think about it honestly, I don’t really live that way.

Is it even possible for the human mind to stop responding to context? And what else is lost, if we do? Do we turn into walking resumes, constantly sanitizing everything that we do and say out of fear that someone might see it and disapprove?

Could privacy even be defined as the right to always be seen in the proper context?

II. Privacy and Time

People also change over time. I’m not the same person I was 4 years ago. And I’m really not the same person I was 9 or 10 years ago. Nonetheless, there are things that I wrote 9 years ago, when I was fifteen for crying out loud. And that’s all still floating around out there, right alongside this blog post that I am writing today.

This is not information that I would present to a stranger, given the choice.

In a way, Google keeps the past tied to us, like Jacob Marley’s chains. If words from 10 years ago can be found as easily as something I said yesterday, can I ever really leave anything behind?

How are you supposed to know who I am now, when you can see all of the people that I’ve ever been?

III. Privacy and Effort

Intuitively, this is what I think is right:

It’s morally okay to Google someone. However, it’s not ethical to look beyond the first page or two of results.

Here’s why: Most of the time it takes some effort to get something on the first page of Google for your name. You have to make an effort to get people to link, you have to use your real name prominently and publicly. I tend to assume that these are the items that people want you to find.

Once you get past the first page or two, you start getting into the accidental stuff — things that people may not even know are out there. That’s where it starts to become questionable, in my mind.

IV. Self-Defense

Want to know what someone could find out about you online?

Start with your name. Google it. See what comes up.

Take all of the email addresses and usernames from all of those places. Google each one of those. See what comes up.

Now take all of those email addresses and usernames. (Have you found anything yet that you’d forgotten you had?)

Google them. See what else comes up.

Repeat.

And that’s what can be found out about you online.

Lately I’ve gotten sucked into playing the Facebook game, Farmville. (Apologies to those on my friends list.) I am seriously impressed by the designers of this game. They managed to take an incredibly simple idea and design it to take advantage of several powerful psychological quirks, thus turning a game about farming (!) into the single most popular Facebook app.

What are some of the clever things that Farmville does?

1. Set Completion — We are driven to complete our collections of things.

This is perhaps the psychological trick that Farmville employs the most. Farmville has so many sets of things to collect: achievement ribbons, buildings, gifts, even different colors of cows. In general, once you possess a partial set, most people are compelled to complete the whole thing. There’s something about a collection that is incomplete; it just doesn’t sit too well with many of us.

Farmville is always introducing players to different types of things we can collect. And of course, once you’ve started a set, you have to finish it…

2. Social reciprocity — We feel compelled to help people who help us.

This is another biggie. The fact is, in order to get ahead in the game, you must receive help. The game offers several ways to help others: you can send them gifts, fertilize their crops, help out on their farm, and make Wall posts that give people access to special bonuses. Many of the ribbons and achievements in the game are dependent on being helped in these ways.

And of course, once you are helped by someone, most people feel a strong compulsion to return the favor. This keeps people engaged because the balance sheet is never quite even, so some type of social obligation is always in effect.

It also encourages players to bring more people into the game; after all, the more ‘neighbors’ you have, the more gifts you can receive and the quicker you will gain a lot of the achievements. I think this ’sharing’ aspect accounts for a large part of Farmville’s rapid rise in popularity.

3. Loss aversion — We hate to lose anything.

In Farmville, you have a certain window of time to harvest your crops, or else they wither and you don’t profit. This is brilliant because, by forcing people to invest in seeds and plowing, Farmville is creating an attachment to those crops. Then, by enforcing a short window of time to take action to avoid the loss of those crops, Farmville forces you to return to the game on a regular basis.

This draws users back to where the other psychological hooks can kick in.

4. Customization — We design spaces to display our own personalities.

The entire basis of Farmville is that you are given a ’space’ that is all your own: your farm. And, along with planting crops and raising animals, you can add buildings and decorative objects to this space, in order to make it more fully ‘yours’. In fact, by my count, about half of the items that you can buy have no effect on the game mechanics at all.

Rationally, why would you allocate scarce resources to such objects? But people do, because we are driven to customize our virtual space, to make it reflect ourselves; and by extension to acquire more resources so that we can perform more customizations.

5. Variable Interval Reinforcement — When we receive rewards at unpredictable intervals, we are compelled to continue.

Sometimes Farmville will randomly give you gifts, like money or items to be used on your farm. (The game also combines this principle with #2, social reciprocity, by randomly allowing you to give a special gift to other players, such as special eggs and flower bouquets.) This is considered variable interval reinforcement because it reinforces the desired behavior — playing Farmville — with rewards, on an unpredictable basis.

The gifts serve to keep people engaged in the game, because you have to keep checking in to see if you’ve gotten something that you need.

So there you have it: 5 ways that Farmville effectively taps into human psychology.

The things that interests me is, how can we use this in other areas of design?

How can I make my local restaurant listing site more interesting by tapping into set completion behavior? How could a charity fundraising site employ social reciprocity to draw users in? How could a financial site tap into loss aversion?

I think we could all stand to learn a few things from this simple Facebook farming game.

(If anyone has a good link on the psychology of customization, send it over. That’s the only principle for which I couldn’t find a good source.)