Mental Floss

Foursquare’s Secret: Badge Psychology

Last Friday, 4/16, Foursquare celebrated Foursquare Day. The twittersphere erupted with celebratory “Happy Foursquare Day” tweets. And Foursquare gave out a special badge to those who joined the tweet-tastic party. 

Mashable used it as an opportunity to write about the startup’s meteoric rise. At nearly one million users and 22 million checkins, Foursquare, which launched in March 2009, is growing at nearly twice the rate of Twitter. (Twitter took 2 years to hit one million users). 

But nobody seems to be asking the big question: why? 

What enabled Foursquare to grow so quickly? Ostensibly, it’s just another way to update your Twitter status with the added bonus of sending notifications directly to friends who want them. So why did Foursquare manage to race past Twitter’s initial growth rate?

The obvious answer is that Twitter itself provides Foursquare with an invaluable promotional tool by enabling the service to reach a broad audience outside its user base. Without Twitter, Foursquare would have taken more than twice as long to reach half a million users. But that doesn’t really explain why people start using it in the first place. What is the value of broadcasting your location by going into an application and selecting from a list of places in your area when you could just type in a quick tweet? What is the added value of making a location-based update via this application?

The secret of Foursquare lies squarely in its variable ratio reward system. Read: BADGES, MAYORSHIPS and other promos that it doles out at variable check-in count. 

In behavioral psychology, variable ratio reward systems have been studied to death—first by BF Skinner and later, a slew of scientists interested in the psychology of gambling. These systems came out of Skinner’s work in operant conditioning, a process by which consequences are used to change the occurrence and type of behavior. Skinner found the most effective and lasting form of conditioning is positive reinforcement, where rewards are given as a way to increase a type of behavior. Within positive reinforcement, the best way to get a behavior to stick is to reinforce it with a reward after an unpredictable number of times. Just like Foursquare, when it doles out badges after irregular number of check-ins. 

While Foursquare may have pioneered badge psychology, some of the most heavily used sites, games and apps also leverage this approach to encourage repeat visits. For instance, users on Farmville don’t know what it will take to pass a level or what kind of fun announcement they’ll get to make to their Facebook friends after a period of time playing the game. They just buy land, help neighbors and farm until something awesome happens. On Facebook, users never know whether a link or a status update they posted will attract comments or get some “thumbs up” from friends. But, every time a user gets some kind of reward for an action, it’s clear that it goes a long way to encouraging them to check-in, post a status update or play another hour of a game. (This is also why slot machines are so good at making money). 

In short, if you’re looking for a way to increase traffic to your site, grow a user base or get more followers, consider building in a system or variable ratio positive reinforcement. Ask yourself, what can we give away at random intervals that will get users to check back, comment or engage on a deeper level? If you’re at a loss for what you can offer, take a look around. There’s plenty out there worth imitating.  

Why You Shouldn’t Skimp on Good Design

After spending a week reviewing the portfolios of design candidates who replied to a job posting, I learned three things:

1. Arrogance rarely helps, despite what Shirky says.
2. Great design is not as pervasive as I had thought. 
3. It takes me about 5 seconds to decide whether a design is any good.

The latter discoveries got me thinking. What makes good design so damn good? Why do I feel fireworks exploding in my brain when I see something that just “works”? And why do I make up my mind so quickly? Granted, some of this has much to do with my own personality, experience and biases, but there’s got to be something universal about the way we process visual information, right? I mean, it’s pretty common for the team here to agree on whether a design is “good” even if it isn’t “right” for a certain client. On a basic level, we tend to like certain things universally, (even when we don’t always admit it).

Sure enough, there’s a whole area in psychology focused on understanding the manipulation of visual attention. The most relevant approach to deciphering how this works for graphic design lies within feature integration theory. FIT posits that two different kinds of attention are responsible for enabling us to understand the visual world: feature search and conjunction search.

Feature search is a subconscious process of noting sensory information like color, orientation and intensity to identify the target you are searching for. For instance, in the example below, an O is found quickly among Xs. Or, a red object is found quickly among black objects. Physiological evidence suggests we have special receptors that respond to different visual features.  

Conjunction search entails the conscious process of identifying and combining the sensory detail to identify a target—combining two different features like color and orientation. Conjuction search is much slower than feature search as it requires conscious attention. In this example, a try searching for the orange square.

As sources of rich visual information, websites present our brains with a number of visual features that it must make sense of before we consciously interact with it. FIT tells us that our brains immediately recognize specific key visual features like color, orientation, and intensity without us realizing it. That. That right there is why solid design is so important. And presents one reason why I am able to determine when a designer is worth his or her salt.

Quality design has the power to direct the subconscious eye toward the information that is of greatest value to the client. Unfortunately, some design does a great job at muddling that pathway. And that is precisely why the best interactive designers can justify their hefty rates. 

Here are three tactics to keep in mind as you jump into designing your next interactive experience: 

1. Intensity. Our eyes are trained to pick up the nuanced differences in a color’s brightness. Use gradients in backgrounds to channel attention. 
2. Color. We are predisposed to react to different colors in expected ways. For instance, it’s easy for us to pick out a bright yellow in a sea of blue features. Use color to attract attention to specific points of interest. Make sure you are drawing attention to what you are intending to highlight. For more info on color theory, check this out.
3. Orientation. Our brains are very good at picking out the one item that’s upside down, backward, somehow uniquely different. If you need to draw attention to something in particular, think about altering their shape or positioning so it stands out from a group.

Go ahead. Try these out. If you manage to manipulate user attention within the precious first few seconds of a site visit, the chances of a conversion will increase exponentially and the ROI speaks for itself.