Add a little more random to your product

You know the feeling: You follow a near-random trail of blog links and land on the post that solves your big business problem. You randomly flip through a physics book and find next week's sermon. You're shopping for discount dog food when you find your dream date. It's the powerful charm of the iPod Shuffle ("How did it KNOW that's just the song I needed to hear right now..."). It's serendipity. And maybe we should build more opportunities for it into our products, services, and lives.

In user experience design, especially, we often work our asses off to remove unpredictability. That's a good thing, mostly. An interface that does what you expect drops away so you can focus on whatever it is you're using the product to do. While we assume that randomness plays a big role in games, we do our best to strip it from "serious" products and services. But there are plenty of ways to keep a user experience consistent while still supporting--even encouraging--the chance for serendipity. And serendipity is delightful, astonishing, sexy, rewarding, inspiring...

When the iPod Shuffle first came out, the ads were based on the theme, "Life is random." I thought it was one of the lamest marketing spins ever. I imagined the meetings, "Let's spin the lack of display as a feature. Yeah, that's it. We'll sell the inability to choose your music as a benefit!"

But I was so so so wrong. Within a few weeks' of the Shuffle's release, the serendipity effect had kicked in. "OMG! That was the perfect song for this!" "Seriously. It can't be random. It's putting songs together that just... work*" The Shuffle was getting people out of their playlist ruts. Out of the music comfort zones we all fall into (emo, anyone?). Exposing them to songs they'd loaded onto their pre-Shuffle iPod but that never seemed to be one of The Chosen Ones. Think about it. Think about all the music on your (non-Shuffle) iPod, computer, or vintage CD rack. Now think about the subset you actually listen to regularly. For most of us, it's a pathetically small set. By literally forcing people to listen to randomly-chosen songs, the Shuffle was constantly delighting, surprising, rewarding, stretching users. And users loved it.

Filters drive a bigger need for randomness today
We're all on info overload, and filters are the best antidote. Whether it's a tech or politics aggregator like Techmeme or Memeorandum, a topic-specific blog/online news site like Slashdot or Engadget, or our own hand-crafted custom news page like My Yahoo, we're all looking for ways to narrow the funnel. Even semi-smart online shopping sites like Amazon become a filter, telling us what we're most likely to be interested in, and even letting us help tune it to be more precise. But all this filtering, tuning, and pruning keeps us stuck! We end up seeing only what we think we want to see--what we're already familiar with--and slashes our chances for serendipity. And that means slashing our ability to create and innovate, or even to be truly surprised and delighted.

How can we add more chances for serendipity into our products, services, and even lives?

Of course it depends greatly on the product, with random-by-design (like the Shuffle) on the extreme edge of the Predictable/Random continuum. But here are a few (randomly-chosen) examples:

1) Staff picks of the Day/Week/Month
The bestseller lists reflect the popularity of the many. "Recommended for you" picks reflect what people just like us have bought. Both of these narrow the funnel, but the "Staff Picks" can introduce something new, especially when the staff pickers go out of their way to introduce things you might have otherwise missed.

2) Encourage other users to post "off-label" uses of the product
Don't just showcase examples of how the product can be used in the usual way. Get users to submit stories, pictures, examples, etc. of ways they used the product to do something nobody (or at least YOU) never imagined.

3) Randomly introduce things from completely unrelated domains
If you aggregate home improvement stories, for example, have a place where you insert a semi-random--but high quality--post from a non-home-improvement field.

4) Use cards from a shuffled "idea" deck
The idea is simple: select a card from a shuffled deck, and act as though whatever the card says is directly relevant to your current problem.
Some favorites:

Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies (designed for musicians and artists, but works for anything.)

Roger von Oech's original Creative Whack Pack (a long-time favorite of mine... I started using it more than a decade ago, and it's a big part of why I'm such a fan of Roger).

The IDEO Method Cards
I've never used them, but they're visually stunning, and others have recommended them.

5) The old standby: subscribe to magazines from unrelated domains
Walk through a large newstand, and linger in some of the sections you usually skip. You just never know when Cat Lover Today is going to have that perfect answer for you.

Even more challenging--but interesting--is to go beyond newstand magazines and flip through professional journals you find at the home of a friend or business associate (or waiting in the dentist's office). Who knows how many times we 'reinvent the flat tire' simply because it's never been solved in our world, while a gazillion solutions are out there in unrelated fields.

6) Find SOME means to add randomness (or pseudo-randomness) directly into your product or service
While a random tip-of-the-day is one implementation (and just because it's so often done badly, annoyingly, intrusively, and obnoxiously doesn't mean it HAS to be that way), there are probably a lot of other ways to introduce--perhaps as a user option--some element of random or pseudo-randomness. Drum machines (and other electronic/midi music software) sometimes let you choose to automatically insert subtle, somewhat random shifts in the music to make it just a little less perfect... which means a little more real-sounding.

Google has an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button that takes you straight to the first web page returned for your search query, but there's nothing random there. And while that's a useful feature, it might be equally useful to add an "I'm feeling bored" button that takes you straight to, say, the 42nd returned hit.

Photoshop has a kind of mutation feature that while not random, lets you instantly view your current image with a variety of different color adjustments. Perhaps they could add a "apply random filter" menu item, and let you see the image with some wild--and semi-random--combination of tweaks. It might never have occurred to you that the "plastic wrap" look is exactly what you needed to use on that picture of your ex you're about to put online for the world.

One of the problems with e-books...
Another area where randomness could matter a lot is in e-books. One of the complaints you hear from dead-tree-book-lovers is that they don't get to flip through the pages. On the surface, this might sound like yet another silly argument, and indeed I've heard e-book champions tell us we'll get over it, we won't care, or--hey--they'll just add a page flipping sound+animation to make us feel better.

But it's not the sound or tactile feel of the page turning that matters... it's the chance for serendipity you lose when you can't easily, randomly flip through the pages! How many times have you flipped to a page in a non-fiction book and--viola!--as if by magic, the thing you need-but-didn't-know-it-until-you-saw-this-page appeared? And no, presenting you with a linear list of thumbnails doesn't count.

There is, however, a fairly simple and at least partial solution I've seen in older experimental prototypes, but have no idea if they're implemented in any current e-book readers: a random "flip through the pages" button. But it can't just be a sudden HERE IS PAGE 267 thing. It needs to have a visual that shuffles through the pages (like the Apple cover-art thing on iTunes) in a way that displays them large enough to see something potentially interesting. In other words, it's the serendipity of a simple flip through the book that needs to be retained.

Finally...

Perhaps the best way for us all to up our chances for serendipity is to cultivate diversity wherever, however, whenever we can. Like I said earlier about filters, the bright side of efficiency and focus comes with a dark side of narrow vision. The good news? Remembering to keep a bit of random (or at least semi-random) input goes a long way. Think of the implications. You really, really, really don't want your kids to think about your music tastes (or potential music stagnation) the way you felt about your parents (who still listen to the music they played in college), do you? Seriously. Who knows which hot hipster band of today is the Barry Manilow of tomorrow... so don't get stuck.

Apple's original Shuffle promo said "Life is Random", but that's stating the obvious. Perhaps a better mantra would be, "Random is Life." We could all use more of it, and if we can give our users a few more moments of serendipity, we're giving them a wonderful gift.

Bonus related links:

*The randomness of the iPod Shuffle is hotly debated (including but not limited to the computer science issues of "random"). Read more here, here, and--if you're a math/stats geek--here.

Randomness, artificial intelligence, and art.

One of Maggie Boden's wonderful essays on unpredictability and creativity. A sample:

"With the help of this mental discipline, even flaws and accidents may be put to creative use. Oliver Sacks reports the case of a jazz drummer suffering from Tourette's syndrome.24 He is subject to sudden, uncontrollable, muscular tics. These occur, though with reduced frequency, even when he is drumming. As a result, his drumsticks sometimes make unexpected sounds. But this man's musical skill is so great that he can work these supererogatory sounds into his music as he goes along. At worst, he "covers up" for them. At best, he makes them the seeds of unusual improvisations which he could not otherwise have thought of. (Similar remarks apply to jazz musicians who use Hodgson's program to help spawn interesting musical ideas, or to artists and designers who use "evolutionary" computer-systems in developing ideas which they could not have thought up by themselves.)"

The Future of the Book

Questions to ask randomly

So... what are YOU doing to keep random input in your life and/or the lives of your users?