Usability through fun

I've heard myself say that things can be both usable AND fun, but what if things might be more usable because they're fun? What if we started including fun in our specs? And I'm not talking about games. Can a spreadsheet be fun? A word processor? A can opener? A city government report? A church service? A technical document? A camera?

Before you start rolling your eyes, let me remind us all that FUN is not the same as FUNNY. Hugh's cartoons are funny. Chess is not. But most people who play chess still consider it fun. They enjoy it.

People are often turned off by the idea of adding "fun" to an otherwise serious product simply because they think it means "humour" or "silly." But while things which are "amusing" are often fun, things which are fun aren't necessarily amusing. The key phrase to link with fun is enjoy doing it. So, the kind of fun I'm talking about here includes both the chess kind (i.e. cognitive seduction) and the joke/cartoon kind.

Jakob Nielson defines usability with five components:

* Learnability

* Efficiency

* Memorability

* Errors

* Satisfaction

"Fun" can directly improve three, and potentially the other two as well. The key is this:

Brains reward play.

Brains like play, because play is important to survival. But how does the brain know that play is happening? The chemistry associated with having fun. If something is enjoyable, that registers in the brain, and the brain rewards us with reinforcing feelings and--more importantly--attention and memory! All things being equal, fun things are more memorable than things which are not enjoyable. (Remember: it need only be fun, not funny)

If something is made more memorable, more easily learned, and more sastifying... we've improved usability. What about efficiency and errors? Benefits of fun are more indirect here, but one connection is something like this:

The more fun something is, the more likely you are to keep doing it.

The more you do it, the better you'll get. By that logic, the more enjoyable a task is, the more likely you are to do it (i.e. practice), which often means an improvement in efficiency and error-reduction (assuming the product isn't otherwise a usability nightmare).

What got me thinking about fun today was the city of Bryan Texas Water Quality Report. US cities over a certain size are required to create them for city residents. Nobody reads them. Even if the data is made accesible and clear, it's still not inviting enough to get someone to take time out to read the damn thing. In other words, these reports aren't very usable.

That might not be a big problem--that nobody reads them--but it's an opportunity the city has to communicate with their residents about something we (in the US) often take for granted--the city-supplied water that fills our pipes as if by magic. And cities want their residents to understand and appreciate what's really going on back/under there, and to learn more about what they should and shouldn't do to improve water usage and quality.

The city of Bryan started all this with last year's report--which I first talked about in Never Underestimate the Power of Fun. They raised the bar for a government report awfully high. But the new one that just came out appears to top it. Keep in mind that most water quality reports look like this:

But the new Bryan, Texas report looks like this:

Jay Socol writes:

Before, residents threw the water report away and never read it, but now they not only read it, they look forward to receiving it... and they keep it all year! It makes people smile, laugh and believe their city government has a sense of humor.

The older report didn't "say" anything about Bryan (or its residents), but this says we care enough to give you important info, but make it fun. (And this is also an image makeover like none other for our mayor. Look, he's having fun!)

No one ever commented about the old report, good or bad, but today we get unbelievable amounts of unsolicited feedback from citizens, businesses, and peer cities."

For me, one of the best parts is how Bryan, Texas made some of the "unknown heroes"--the folks who (literally) have the crappiest jobs possible--into minor celebrities. According to Jay Socol, morale among these city employees has gotten quite a boost from this project. (And can you imagine someone walking down the street and saying, "Hey, you're the guy on October..." to one of the city plumbers? It's happening.)

Never underestimate the power of fun, and remember that while this calendar was actually laugh-out-loud funny (you have to read the posters... my favorite was "Flushdance"), you can still have "fun" without "funny." It's about the user's experience (i.e. cognitive seduction). And even if you aren't in a position to introduce more fun into your actual product, you can still add it to documentation and support!