Cognitive Design

Angry Birds is a strong candidate for the most successful game of all time. With nearly 100 million downloads it sees some 1.2 billion of hours of play every year! A masterful cognitive design on the order of lottery tickets.  To understand which features and functions are generating the impact check out the excellent post on the cognitive teardown of the user experience.

I will quote some key findings from the post below but strongly urge you get the game, play it yourself and share insights into why it works.

1. Interaction should be simple and engaging

The key is to make it easy to learn the basics on the first experience and then learn a bit more on each play.

“Angry Birds’ simple interaction model is easy to learn because it allows the user to quickly develop a mental model of the game’s interaction methodology, core strategy and scoring processes. It is engaging, in fact addictive, due to the carefully scripted expansion of the user’s mental model of the strategy component and incremental increases in problem/solution methodology.”

Angry Birds is a casual physics-based game. Playing gives a constant flow of encouragement. You are rewarded immediately for progress. This keeps the good brain chemicals pumping.

2.  Manage response time not just for speed but for cognitive impact.

The birds move and interact fairly slowly giving you a chance to learn how to adjust their behavior and savor interaction effects. Slowing the action down to give you a chance to savor a big move or a victory is used in many popular games. Some games even let you replay key segments. Another technique known to enhance savoring.

3.  Bend but don’t break short term memory.

Short term memory holds a few items we can briefly pay attention to. Overloading it is a bad idea but over writing it to cause information loss can improve engagement.

“There are many examples in the Angry Birds game model of this principle in action. Probably one of the most compelling is the simple screen flow manipulation at the beginning of each new play sequence. When the screen first loads, the user is shown a very quick view of the structure that is protecting the pigs. Just as quickly, the structure is moved off screen to the right in a simple sliding motion.”

4. Hint at mysteries 

Clues that imply hidden functions and objects suggest depth and stimulate the novelty detectors within our brain.

“Angry Birds is full of these little mysteries. For example, why are tiny bananas suddenly strewn about in some play sequences and not in others? Why do the houses containing pigs shake ever so slightly at the beginning of each game play sequence? Why is the game’s play space showing a cross section of underground rocks and dirt? Why do the birds somersault into the sling shot sometimes and not others? “

Such clues heighten engagement when they promise discoveries that will improve  play or help reach a goal.

5. Use multiple and complementing sensory elements

Angry Birds does a great job with sound and visuals.

“For example, in Angry Birds, we hear the birds chatter angry encouragement to their colleagues as each prepares for launch. We hear avian dialogue as the birds arc toward their targets and hear the pained response from their victims when they strike their targets.”

Consistently applied such features deepen engagement by pulling on additional sensory dimensions to create realism and provide feedback. Angry Birds look and sound angry but in a cute way.

While these principles of gamification are not new, seeing them all working at once in a single design is unique.  The challenge now is to apply them to the design of other “more serious” artifacts and services.

For example, how can we use gamification to create new services to help folks to remember to take their medications on time (medication compliance)?

Thanks to Max from BSU for bring this example of reverse cognitive engineering to my attention.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Behavior Change, Examples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.