The Spark of Connection (aka Experience Doping)
Thanks to my dog, Bruno, for serving as space-dog-model.
An accidental hero
In the early 1990s, Windows released a surprise standout program. Users flocked to it, spending more time on it than the much-vaunted Word or Excel. This program was developed by a bored intern named Wes Cherry on a lark and included by Windows ostensibly only to train users on how to operate this newfangled thing called a mouse. This program yielded no visible benefits to the user; it did not produce spreadsheets or documents. It did not allow the user to read email or the news. But it had one thing that trumped all of these shortcomings in attracting and keeping users: an absolutely killer cascading card animation at the end. That’s right, the program that beat out both Word and Excel in total usage time in Windows 95 was…Solitaire.
Dopamine enters the ring
What Wes Cherry had accidentally discovered (and I would argue, what Microsoft and many other B2B software makers promptly forgot) was the powerful effect of dopamine when introduced into a consistently repeatable experience.
Let’s back up. You’ve probably heard of dopamine – it is a neurotransmitter in charge of all sorts of functions in the body, from mood to muscle contraction to digestion. It’s what Parkinson’s patients lack that causes rigidity and tremors. It’s released in large quantities when people are exposed to drugs like nicotine and opioids causing a euphoric feeling, but released in much smaller doses (less than 10% of the drug-induced amount) by all sorts of physical and sensory experiences we find pleasurable - from eating a piece of chocolate cake to watching your team win a tight game.
Technology can produce a dopamine hit too. Have you heard of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response)? It refers to the pleasurable tingling sensation we get from certain stimuli, which is also associated with dopamine release. On social media recently, this is often prompted by sounds such as a whisper or blowing on a microphone, but we also experience it when watching someone execute a mundane task carefully (all those cookie decorating and woodworking videos) and when receiving personal attention, like having one’s hair or makeup done. This is powerful enough to even combat depression for some people. All we need is something to trip that magical, pleasure-inducing trigger and we’ll be drawn to experience it again and again. Wes Cherry found that trigger.
Using dopamine carrots instead of hard-stop sticks
Though few realized it at the time, this discovery had the potential to change the way we approach user experience dramatically. In the technology design world, the early tools in the kit were closer to the stick than the carrot - often placing errors and warnings and red exclamation points all over like the form had a sudden case of curiously-shaped chicken pox. If these weren’t all quite sticks, they were certainly handcuffs - forcing users to enter things the way the system wanted. This is effective in the short term, but causes people to hate the product and find workarounds to avoid using it – a far cry from the type of raving fans we want to inspire
While it may seem obvious that dopamine hits work in purely entertainment realms, like games and TikTok videos, they can fundamentally change the way we approach task-based technology interactions as well.
When is it right?
While we can’t go putting a card game in a customer renewal flow, we can take some cues from the success of the Microsoft Solitaire example. The secret is: users prefer most experiences to be appropriately entertaining, even task-based experiences. The card animation was related to the game the user had just played, and had a visual tie-in to certain card tricks people do in real life, and was an unexpected treat, therefore it was not only enjoyable but felt natural in the experience.
Picture yourself ordering your favorite dish from a food delivery app. You’re anticipating how great it’s going to taste, and just when you submit your order, you see a nice animation of…cascading cards. No wait! That’s not right. Let’s make it an animation of steaming food, and that dissolves and you get to watch the order on a map as it makes its way to you. These little sprinkles of magic dust in the experience weren’t strictly necessary to accomplish the task, but they made the experience more positive and self-reinforcing. Those dopamine hits along the way will create an emotional memory of the experience that transcends the mundane task you completed and makes you more likely to go back.
We will use dopamine where it feels right to the user.
One might think then that if dopamine makes people feel more connected to an experience and more likely to come back, we should sprinkle a generous pinch of it over everything we do. But that can actually backfire.
Users sense when we’re manipulating them. Apply the attempted dopamine hits with too heavy a hand, and they’ll smell a rat and it will lose all power. The dopamine hit has to feel genuine, whatever that means for the experience.
Therefore, we don’t hand out dopamine like candy from a parade float. Instead, we use it strategically to reinforce the optimal path, the one we want the user to take. We dope where it counts. The cascading card animation in Solitaire doesn’t show up at the end of every game – only when you win.
We will use dopamine at the emotional peak of the experience (positive or negative).
The cascading cards show up when you’ve won the game - the emotional peak of the experience. Imagine how odd it would feel if the animation appeared at any other point in the game. It would be jarring and out of place.
Business flows have emotional peaks too. It might feel a little odd to think of it that way at first, but if you’ve ever experienced a spark of exhilaration after executing a challenging task well, or frustration after being repeatedly stymied trying to complete something by a deadline, you know this to be true. Emotions are happening all the time, even when our analytical brain is active and ostensibly running the show.
The Peak-End effect tells us that enhancing specifically the emotional peak and the end leads to the user rating the entire experience as more positive. This is good news because souping up every interaction would slow delivery time and increase cost beyond the point of return. We are better off to invest our resources in optimizing the moments that have the greatest impact, the peak and the end. Further good news for business tasks is that these are often the same moment.
What are some examples of doping the peak of the experience?
Showing a salesperson an aesthetic chart of their expected commission from the order they just booked.
Showing a customer the expected delivery timeline of the order they just placed.
Animating the appearance of the PDF thumbnails for the proposal a user just submitted.
In each of these cases, we take the point in time when the user is already feeling positively about their accomplishment (completing a task) and multiply the effect by adding dopamine.
Sometimes emotional peaks are negative.
A secondary use case is to take the sting out of peak negative experiences from which we can’t protect the user. While the goal is always to eliminate dead ends and negative experiences, sometimes there are events that would be too costly to fully eliminate. A common example of this is the entertaining error page. Mailchimp, for example, has a lightly humorous 404 page that incorporates their branding and a fun animation. This little dopamine hit shows care for the user in a moment of frustration and allows the platform to connect with a person who’s experiencing a negative emotional peak. Just like a hug from a friend on a tough day can create interpersonal connection, the digital equivalent can increase connection with the platform.
Mailchimp’s lightly humorous 404 page (it’s animated!)
Find the overlap between the user’s goals and the platform’s goals and highlight it
The platform has certain things it wants from users. Some of these may go against what the user themselves wants. For example, an ordering platform wants to sell more, whereas the user may want to contain cost. Users know there is a fundamental tension between their desires and the desires of the entity behind the technology they’re interacting with. Much like the classic used car salesman no one trusts, in the absence of other evidence, users may mistrust the motivations of your technology.
In B2B software, there is some area where the goals of the two organizations overlap, or where the goals of the organization overlap with the goals of the individual. This overlap forms the basis for the business relationship.
There are also areas where the goals do not overlap and may even work against each other and pull apart.
We want to find the point of overlap and emphasize and reinforce it with doped experiences. The area of overlap is an area of connection between the organization and the user that we want to emphasize. Done well, this leads to higher user loyalty because the user feels that the platform (and therefore the organization) just gets them and is aligned with their interests.
Let’s look at an example. In our organization, we have a concept called points. The team accrues points when they complete revenue-generating activities, and earning points over time qualifies a team member for a raise. This is carefully designed so that the points align exactly with the goals of the organization: the points aren’t awarded until the feature is complete, and they scale with the amount of revenue it generates. This is one of the most powerful moments in our ecosystem: the organization’s goals are perfectly aligned with the goals of the user. This is a moment that will benefit from doping. Making this a memorable experience (its own equivalent of the cascading cards animation) reinforces the spark of connection where the user (our team member) is already feeling connected to the goals of the organization and their impact on those goals..
External users can experience this powerful connection too. Imagine what happens when a salesperson lets a customer know, regarding something they have already offered to pay full price for, that there’s a discount available to them. They already had the sale, so it’s not an effort to get them to say yes. In this gesture, the salesperson showed the customer that their interests are in keeping them happy long-term, and they feel connected. This might also look like a game letting you know when you’ve hit a screen time limit you’ve set, and asking if you want to take a break, or a B2B app offering to optimize your campaigns for you. The most memorable tend to be when you counter the apparent conflict between assumed-opposing desires by reinforcing a “we win when you win” type of mentality. These generate dopamine on their own, but you can also enhance it consciously through careful design of intrinsically enjoyable elements.
Summary
We’ve discussed the value of ‘doping’ a platform’s peak experiences to create greater connection between the audience and the technology, and ultimately the business behind the technology.
Of course, these attempts can go awry. After the blazing success of Solitaire, Microsoft stumbled with Clippy, a much-maligned attempt at a cute assistant character that debuted with Windows 97. Clippy didn’t follow any of the guidelines here: it was present way too often, was not associated with peak experiences, didn’t feel natural in the environment, and often failed to connect with users and show alignment of objectives (it was infamous for offering irrelevant suggestions). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Clippy was more or less universally despised.
Like virtually everything else, using experience doping is not just about knowing the technique itself, it’s about knowing when to use it. When applied skillfully, these opportunities are the difference between technology that feels like a necessary evil, and technology that people rave about.
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