UX Bites #12 — Stoic, Arc & more...

Hey 👋,

What’s that famous phrase? UX never sleeps? Or something like that?

No, I probably made it up.

Either way, here are the 5 UX Bites that you need to see.

1. Games inside your video chat

The video chat service ‘Around’ has built-in 'team games', which allow a seamless transition from video call, into a multiplayer minigame.

I spoke to a team that used this for their daily stand-ups, and apparently “if we finish early we can play one game of Bomberman” is a really good incentive for people to stop saying “let’s circle back”.

2. Opting out of gamification

Stoic recognizes that the pressure of gamification isn’t for everyone, and lets you opt out of the streaks mechanism.

3. Leveraging loss aversion

When setting up the Arc browser, it'll casually remind you of all the effort that you’d have to put in if you don’t import settings from your existing browser.

i.e., the CTA label of “No, I want to type in all my passwords again”, adds weight to what could easily have been “Not now”.

4. Interactive marble run

Scrolling on Trunk will trigger a ball to roll down a series of winding tracks, until it drops into the logo in the footer.

This delightful animation (which is user-controlled, to a certain extent) motivates people to scroll through the page content.

(Try it here).

5. Zillow’s “quick view”

Zillow allows you to customize the property summaries, so that only relevant metadata appears when you're browsing and comparing options.

i.e., you can change what appears at the top of an actual listing, not just what’s shown in the search results.

Plus, in the last 2 weeks I’ve added UX Bites from Readwise, Bank of America, Robinhood, Ahead, IKEA and many more.

There’s no better way to get a quick blast of UX inspiration (in my very, very biased opinion*).

*My opinion is sponsored by Built for Mars.

As always, it helps with deliverability if you reply (if you can’t think of anything to say, just send me a meme).

- Peter