Make It Fun: Chaos in Product Design
What Brutalism, Wabi Sabi, and Virtual Reality have in common.
I recently had the pleasure of playing armchair critic with the folks from Design Details to discuss Arc’s latest feature: Boosts v2. The conversation reminded me of an essay I wrote back in 2020 around the idea of making a product ‘fun’, which is something I’ve encountered often in consumer products. I dusted it off the shelf and updated it a bit to reflect what I’ve learned since then. So… enjoy!
If I had a dollar for every time I've been asked to make a product fun, I’d have like... 43 dollars. But still, that's a lot of times! Fun is one of those words like good, love, and art: so simple and all-encompassing that it eludes definition. So, what do we mean when we strive to make a product more fun?
Perhaps a good analog for fun in Product Design is Wabi-Sabi. For the uninitiated, Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese worldview that stands in sharp contrast to the hyper-polished modern aesthetic that most designers love today. It’s centered around the acceptance of transience and imperfection.
Characteristics of wabi-sabi aesthetics and principles include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and the appreciation of both natural objects and the forces of nature.
In the context of interface design, the “force of nature” is the human controlling the interface. If pixels are people inhabiting the Earth, the user’s thumb is the almighty weather himself. “Appreciating the forces of nature” in an interface means letting go of the rigidity in the systems that govern its pixels. This can introduce a sense of unpredictability and fun into an otherwise dry experience.
Another contender for fun is the resurgence of Neobrutalism in Product Design. Like Wabi Sabi, Neobrutalist Product Design is unapologetic about its imperfections and it revels in its chaos. Although the original brutalist goal was to prioritize function over form, Neobrutalism is so contrasting with the way interfaces are expected to be designed today that it almost has the opposite effect.
Some designers interpret Neobrutalism to mean rebelling against oversimplified design by intentionally creating ugly, disorienting, or complex interfaces. In Neobrutalist design, form takes a lead role but it does so without any attempt at perfection. Instead, it is so raw and accessible that it becomes inviting for anyone to experiment alongside it. This participatory quality to the design introduces an element of exploration, wonder, and…fun!
Products that give users the license to create chaos are fun. This is true in Virtual Reality as well. During my time at Facebook VR, we spent countless hours designing meticulously organized systems for interacting with virtual objects, then regularly brought people in to test our work. We were often reminded of people’s desire for chaos when we witnessed the first thing they did when interacting with a virtual object in VR: they grabbed it, tossed it, and laughed as it bounced across the virtual environment. If it shattered on the floor, they did it again but even more enthusiastically. They created chaos seemingly as a rebellion against the order in the real world and in doing so, their faces turned from a skeptic frown to a joyful grin.
So how do we create fun products? Well, the trick is to design systems that account for chaos: introduce users to unbound interaction and then walk them back into systematic order. A few examples:
Fun products react to user input
What better way to “appreciate the forces of nature” and resist convention than by relinquishing control of your interface to the whim of the user? If a serious product is a hammer, a fun product is Play-Doh, empowering users to touch and manipulate everything to express themselves fully — that’s where fun can be truly unleashed.
Fun products ask for forgiveness, not permission
A fun product is one where the user doesn’t have to ask for permission to interact with it. That means, no explicit modes or state changes to enter “edit mode.” Fun products reward exploration and serendipity. They react to the user’s touch and adapt its interface accordingly. Want to drop a sticker in the middle of a message? Sure! Want to use a glitter background to bedazzle your homepage? Go for it! Don’t know how to accomplish something in the app? Poke around and see what happens until you find what you’re looking for!'
Fun products are child-like, not childish
It’s easy to confuse fun with childish: bubbly and colorful aesthetics to dress down an otherwise sterile and corporate product. ‘Serious’ interfaces rigidly align elements to a grid, creating a sense of rhythm and unity. By contrast, ‘Fun’ can be derived from the lack of order, like iMessage letting users drop stickers anywhere on a chat thread or our old pal MySpace, who let its users edit their page’s CSS ad nauseam. Those product decisions are widely considered fun not because they’re childish or designed for children, instead they appeal to our collective child-like aspiration that the world isn’t actually a set of interconnected systems and rules but a vast landscape of undiscovered possibilities to be explored in a seemingly infinite amount of time.
Fun products are welcoming
Fun is stripped away from a product when users feel like their contributions don’t belong in that product. This is especially true of platforms that rely on user-generated content. For example, when I worked at Facebook, the company struggled to incentivize users to post into the platform. We found that there are many reasons why Facebook’s users self-censor themselves before posting. Chief among them is the perceived quality bar of what makes something “worthy” of sharing with their friends. Facebook users were afraid of having fun and experimenting with the platform because of the social repercussions of creating something they thought wouldn’t meet the product’s standard. The same is true of Instagram’s Grid versus Story posts. Less aesthetically polished products, like Snapchat, invite more experimentation and interaction, which in turn leads to more fun.
Fun products are often not the most efficient
In fact, fun is the opposite of efficiency. Fun is what happens when you lose track of the destination. If we think of digital products as tools that must optimize for the fastest and most intuitive way to accomplish a task, then we are talking about sacrificing fun and serendipity in favor of efficiency and productivity. That’s the paradox of the Fun Designer: the more efficient and scalable a product is, the more predictable, un-fun —and oftentimes successful — it becomes.