How can designers make websites ‘playful’ as a means to engage audiences? Luke Brason, Head of Creative at Grass Roots, argues why a more playful approach to digital projects can keep your audience coming back for more…
How much should you be ‘playing’? I don’t mean playing computer games, board games etc in your own time – I mean how much ‘play’ should be in your work? Let me explain.
My background and current occupation revolves around delivering Web Design and Development projects. I lead a team of designers, front-end developers, copywriters and search engine optimisation and user experience consultants.
With a hands-on approach, my particular specialism is the delivery of well thought out, polished Information Architecture. My belief is that being playful, helps me to do a better job for our clients.
Look in Google for a definition of ‘play’. I like this one:
‘Play is freely chosen; personally directed, intrinsically motivated behaviour that actively engages the child… Play can be fun or serious. Through play children explore social, material and imaginary worlds and their relationship with them, elaborating all the while a flexible range of responses to the challenges they encounter.’ Best Play – Children’s Play Council, NPFA, and PLAYLINK.
With each project I work on:
• I desire people to navigate and interact with my content
• I want customers to spend time on my websites and to enjoy their experience
• I want users to understand my content and my propositions
• I want them to do something at the end of that journey – there is a goal for them to reach
• And I’d like people to repeat visit; I don’t want to be shelved.
In other words, when it comes to website design, my objectives are not far from the goals that ‘play’ seeks to achieve.
Let’s look at a couple of websites that illustrate this notion further. The BBC created an interesting site about dimensions. Instead of illustrating things such as how far Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon with numbers and graphs, they took a very different and highly playful approach (see picture). Try it with your home postcode and you’ll see what I mean.
http://howbigreally.com/dimension/space/moonlanding
Another site full of exploration and play is Peugeot’s 208 virtual city. The whole site is very rich but in particular their ‘208 Experience’ section houses one of the best webcam ‘game’ ideas I’ve seen – I’ll spoil it for you if I say anymore, but suffice to say it meets all of the objectives that I outlined above:
http://www.208.peugeot.co.uk/
Among the team I work with, beneath any Information Architecture and subsequent web design, there exists a deliberate intention to make our sites playful. Not because we are all big kids at heart (that’s just a coincidence) but because we believe this provides the best experience and that it’s genuinely the best method for achieving a website’s goals (be that learning something, selling something, researching a product, buying something , etc). In other words, embracing play gives us a better chance of helping our clients achieve their goals.
Here are the Grass Roots creative team’s top 20 tips* for getting into a playful frame of mind:
1. Play with your children
2. Get a good night’s sleep
3. Watch a movie / TV show that make you laugh
4. Socialise with good friends
5. Look back at your old school work / folders / doodles
6. Work in an office with like-minded people
7. Create something (painting, writing, poem)
8. Play with your dog / cat / hamster etc.
9. Participate in a sport
10. Look forward to something
11. Listen to radio comedy
12. Take some photos, get the film developed and enjoy the results
13. Listen to music / go to a gig
14. Take on a new challenge
15. Go outside (perhaps not in the wet summer we’re having though!)
16. Make your office environment somewhere you like being
17. Drink Gin & Tonic or a pint of Guinness
18. Go to lunch with your colleagues on Friday
19. Practice a musical instrument
20. Get up from your desk and go for a walk
* I don’t expect you to do all these! People are so wonderfully varied and different what works for one will not work for all.
By Luke Brason
Head of Creative
Grass Roots
http://www.grassroots.uk.com/
