by Yu-kai Chou
With some very creative marketing, Blendtec’s Founder Tom Dickson decided to launch a video series on YouTube called Will It Blend? In a long series of videos, the CEO dressed up in a lab coat as an scientist and throws novels, golf balls, broomsticks, and highly valued products such as the latest iPhone or iPad into the blender. Before blending the items, Dickson would ask the famous question, “Will it blend?”
Needless to say, this generated a great deal of suspense and curiosity as people watched to see if he would go so far as to destroy a brand-new iPhone. After a visually interesting and noisy display, the iPhone, sure enough, turned into a pile of black dust. These videos were so entertaining and engaging that they were eventually watched by millions.
Having that many viewers is great, but the question remains: did this create a high return on investment (ROI)? Even though the millions of viewers watched the videos for pure entertainment, when they eventually thought about getting a blender, the first name that came to mind was Blendtec: “Well, a Blendtec blender can shred golf balls into dust. I’m sure my vegetables wouldn’t be that bad.”
As an added bonus, the company became the natural recommendation too when friends and family’s mentioned that they needed a new blender. According to a case study released a couple years after the campaign, Blendtec’s revenue shot up by 700%190.
As of 2014, the Blendtec videos had over 242 million viewers on their Youtube channel - close to the population of the United States. Not bad for a blender.
Faking your Way to Virality
Another good marketing example that utilizes Core Drive 7 is Adobe’s Real or Fake campaign. In 2008, Adobe wanted consumers to understand the power of their Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator products. With the new Facebook platform seen as a potential marketing tool for reaching college students, a campaign was created on Adobe’s Student Facebook Page called Real or Fake. Each week five bizarre looking images were posted and college students were challenged to determine whether the images were real or fake.
The participating users were extremely motivated by the mystery of whether these photos were actually real or “photoshopped.” The motivation to participate was also heavily driven by Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback. “This can’t be real. It has to be fake. But it looks so real… even the shadow and textures are perfect. I need to find out.”
As a result, this drove students to revisit the page and regularly participate in the challenges. The beauty of this design was that even if the students got the answer wrong, it only demonstrated how powerful Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator programs were.
At the end of the one-month campaign, most users were impressed by Adobe’s products. According to Elisa Haidt, then Senior Marketing Manager of Adobe, the game was played 14,000 times (keep in mind that Facebook was still a young platform with a much smaller reach than today), with 22% of the users checking out the product tutorials, 6% sharing it with their friends, and 6% clicking the “Buy Now” button.191
Now imagine if the element of suspense and mystery was removed and Adobe simply created a campaign that said, “Check out the amazing photos we created with Adobe products!” I’m quite certain that they would not have had nearly the success of their gamified marketing effort.
Google’s Curious Second Button
Another interesting example that utilizes suspense is Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky Button.” Generally, searches on Google.com lead users to a results page that Google curates to best fit what they deem as most relevant to the keywords entered - alongside some ads that pay Google very well. The user will usually look through the top 3 to 10 search results and find the one that seems to be the most appropriate.
However, on the front page there’s a button that was originally designed to directly bypass all of that. It’s called the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which took users directly to the website of the top search result.
This is very interesting because Google guards its front page design very, very carefully. As told by The Google Story192, Google decided as a young company that they did not want to clutter their front page like Yahoo.com. They were adamant about keeping ads off their front page, despite the tremendous amount of additional revenue it would bring. They maintained this discipline throughout the years, keeping their homepage clean by only including Google’s logo, a text box, and a search function. In the earlier days of the Web, when sites were still loading very slowly over dial-up connections, the simple page strategy paid off like a charm.
But here’s what’s unique about the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button: Though Google ensures that ads would never be shown on their front page, they make a lot of money every day on ads that are embedded in their search results pages. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature bypasses the search results page, which is where Google makes the majority of its ad revenue from. As early as 2007, Tom Chavez from Rapt estimated that Google was losing $110 million a year due to people using the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.193
So why would Google place a silly feature like this on their homepage that costs them significant revenue?
There are a few reasons why: On one hand, if you believe in Google’s search engine intelligence, you will use this button regularly and know that it’ll get you to your destination faster. On the other hand, this button provides a great internal feedback mechanism that incentivizes Google to continue optimizing their search engine algorithms so that more people would choose to click the button. After all, prior to Google, search engines performed rather poorly, even when they brought up 30 results on a page. Google wanted to boast of its ability in finding THE right search result for their users.
From the perspective of user motivation, this button creates a playful and unpredictable experience that drives more engagement with Google. Note that the button was named “I’m Feeling Lucky” instead of “One-Click Search.” The latter would set up incorrect expectations and lead users to think that the technology was terrible if it didn’t perfectly capture the search query.
Google’s playful culture was also famously demonstrated by their periodic logo changes. Major holidays, historic dates, or notable current events are periodically represented by logo doodles, which inspires a lot of Core Drive 7 among their users. The first doodle was created in 1998 to mark the first full company trip to the week-long Burning Man festival.
The doodles and the I’m Feeling Lucky Button have remained intact within the company culture despite their transformation into something “more corporate-like” in the early 2010’s.
More recently, Google changed the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button so that, true to Core Drive 7 principles, when users moused-over it, a slot machine mechanism is revealed, featuring different search options. Selecting “I’m Feeling Wonderful” led you to Google’s World Wonders Project, highlighting cultural sites from around the world. The “I’m Feeling Trendy” option led to their Hot Searches pages, which showed you what was trending on Google. “I’m Feeling Stellar” displayed images of the Orion Nebula. This feature allowed Google fans to satisfy their curiosity by exploring the Google universe and other features. Mashable Journalist Sam Laird writes:
“Fair warning, though — you might get hooked and it’s a major temptation for procrastination. But the Doodle-y pastime isn’t just addictive. It’s smart, too. Think about it: What better way to pimp the vast array of services, tools and pure randomness Google offers its online users? I wasn’t super familiar with the World Wonders Project, for example — but may well go back for some enlightening entertainment later.”194
Using the Octalysis Framework, we can see that despite Google’s weak Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness efforts throughout their products, they have demonstrated a keen interest in bringing out Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity in their user experiences.
Woot! Creates Midnight Cinderella’s
In an earlier chapter, we talked about how eBay and Amazon are great examples of gamified eCommerce sites.
Another lesser known website that heavily integrated gamification is Woot.com. Woot! uses an interesting combination of Core Drive 6: Scarcity and Impatience and Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity to create a compelling experience for their users.
Before daily deal sites became popular, Woot! would display one interesting product every day at a great price for users to buy. The enticing nature of Woot! is that you never know what the product is going to be beforehand and there is always a limit on the number people could purchase. Each day a new product would be introduced at exactly midnight, with the previous deal being removed. Because of that, Woot!’s users were continuously curious about what the next cool product would be and would often check-in daily to see what was the new item on sale.
As you can see from the mechanics, there are also heavy effects from Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience. Often, when you logged in at 4pm in the afternoon, especially in the early days of Woot!, the item would have already been sold out. You then login at 11am the next day, and the new item is still sold out; 8am sometimes yielded no success either. As their eagerness to get the next item continually increased, users would constantly return to the website. Eventually, the website’s default mechanics indirectly trained users to login every day (the Desired Action) at 11:59pm and refresh the page until the new item popped up. Buying the new product at the displayed price became the reward for hitting the site’s win-state.
Consistent with the chapter’s theme, Woot.com’s most coveted item was something called the “Bag of Crap.” This was literally a bag of random items that they would send users in the mail. The bags usually included past demo products that didn’t make the cut, as well as humorous items. There are actually blog posts talking about the best strategies to get the Bag of Crap, as it is quite difficult to obtain. Below is a snippet of some important tips from the blogger “BiomedGirl” to help you get your Bag of Crap195:
Make a Woot.com account and always sign in BEFORE the anticipated Bag of Crap. You will waste precious time if you have to sign in to your account after you finally get the page to load. On a similar note, make sure all your account information is correct when you sign in as well. This includes shipping and billing addresses, and the credit card info. Another good idea is to either memorize the security code on the card or have it copied to your clipboard so you can paste it in when the time comes. Furious F5 (refreshing) Method. This is the most common method for the attempted Bag grab, because it involves no frills. You guesstimate when the coveted Bag of Crap will appear based on the tips above, then open your browser to the Woot! website and refresh the page continuously until you see the Bag of Crap appear. You can tell if the Bag is the item up for grabs when the page seems to refuse to load. At this point I usually have a couple tabs/windows open and watch them until one loads. As soon as you see the ‘I want one!’ button appear, click and wait for the next page. You will have to confirm your account information (which you should have already done) and type in your security code, then click ‘this info is correct’, then the final page you click ‘buy it’ and hope it goes through.
As you can see, there even appears to be a lot of Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback in playing this game. When things are fun and unpredictable, even a bag of crap becomes extremely valuable.
Game Techniques within Unpredictability & Curiosity
You have learned more about the motivational and psychological nature of Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity, but to make it more actionable, I’ve included some Game Techniques below that heavily utilize this Core Drive to engage users.
Glowing Choice (Game Technique #28)
In Chapter 6, we briefly talked about how the Glowing Choice game technique makes users feel smart and competent during the Onboarding Phase. Of course, the Glowing Choice game technique also leads players in the right direction by appealing to their Curiosity.
Most players don’t enjoy reading huge manuals or watching long videos before beginning a game; players would rather have the option to jump right in and test things out. This is where the Glowing Choice comes into play. In many role-playing games, the user is thrown into a massive virtual world with a plethora of things to do and places to explore. However, the player is never confused about what they are supposed to do, because often a specific computer character is highlighted with a glowing exclamation point that prompts the player to engage with them.
Glowing Choice Screenshot of World of Warcraft
Once engaged, the character will reveal the following quest or the next clue to help the player move forward in the game. The player now knows the next Desired Action and never feels directionless.
In contrast to the Desert Oasis game technique mentioned in Chapter 6 where the designer highlights a Desired Action by clearing out everything surrounding it, the Glowing Choice technique is about applying an overlay item that shines like a bright star in the midst of a complex environment. You can apply this method with apps by placing a strong emphasis on a key feature that represents the Desired Action that users need to be guided towards. Many apps do this by having a question mark on top of the key feature, or an arrow that points directly to what they want their potential customers to focus on. I always tell my clients, “Never allow your users to accidentally stumble upon a bad experience.” If users cannot figure out what to do within 4 seconds, they will become disengaged. If a user clicks on any button or tab and reaches a dead end, they are penalized for executing the Desired Action.
The key to good design is to ensure that users don’t need to think about committing the Desired Actions. In fact, users should have to think hard and decide not to take the Desired Action if they don’t want to. If there were a huge animated arrow indicating that you should click on a certain button within an app, the user can still choose not to, but their brain has to work harder to avoid it. Once your customer clicks on the question mark or the arrow, the question mark should disappear. The players can then click on the next highlighted feature to find out what it does and why it helps them.
Mystery Boxes/Random Rewards (Game Technique #72)
One of the more common ways to utilize Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity is through reward structures. Instead of giving users Fixed-Actions Rewards where the steps to obtain them are known - such as the “Earned Lunch” Game Technique in Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession - you can build unpredictability into the experience by altering the context of how the reward is given by the nature of the reward itself.
In games, there is “loot” or “drops,” which are random rewards that appear once the player achieves a Win-State such as opening a treasure box or defeating an enemy. Often, this unpredictable process is what drives players in the Endgame Phase. I call this technique Mystery Boxes (more gameful) or Random Rewards (more technical).
With random rewards, the participant receives an unknown reward by completing a required action. Using this technique recreates the excitement that children have on Christmas Eve. They see the gifts under the tree and know that they won’t find out what the gifts are until a given time has passed. The anticipation of getting the gift, even though they have no idea what’s in the boxes, is part of what makes the experience so exciting.
One example of this technique can be found at holiday parties in the form of the White Elephant gift exchange196. Also known as the “Gift Swap,” this game provides an add-on mechanism for distributing inexpensive or undesirable gifts (often from previous holiday seasons) among participants.
The exchange starts with each participant providing a wrapped gift for the gift pool, and then drawing (unpredictability in itself) a number to determine the order in which they will select a gift. The first person selects and unwraps a gift from the pool.
The next participant can then either select from the pool of unopened gifts or “steal” the opened gift from the first participant, who then has to reselect a replacement gift from the pool.
The subsequent participant repeats the proces
s, having the option to select from the pool or “steal” either gift from the previous players. This goes on until the last player selects the last gift or steals from one of the others, which causes the individual whose gift is stolen to open the last gift. Again, in this case, everyone knows that once they complete the game, a reward will be earned, but what the reward is can only be determined at the end. White Elephant is actually a really fun game, which I personally enjoy greatly. It incorporates almost every single Core Drive in Octalysis. You should try it out with family friends when you have a chance.
A second example of Random Rewards can be seen with a company that is literally called Mystery Box Shop197. Customers join the service through subscription with a monthly fee. Similar to Woot’s “Bag of Crap,” at the first of each month a package containing 5 to 10 “fabulous curiosities,” is shipped out to the customer. The contents of each package follow the theme for that month. Recent themes include “Never Grow Up,” “Hallowawesome,” “Another World,” and “Old School.” Promising to be cool, curious, odd, or even bizarre, each Mystery Box provides an element of curiosity. Consisting of a mixture of clothing, toys, gadgets, snacks, electronics, and who knows what, each delivery is like opening the presents on your birthday. It keeps customers coming back for more.
Easter Eggs/Sudden Rewards (Game Technique #30)
Different from Mystery Boxes, Easter Eggs (or Sudden Rewards) are surprises that are given out without the user acknowledging it beforehand. In other words, where Mystery Boxes are unexpected rewards based on a certain expected trigger, Easter Eggs are rewards based on unexpected triggers.