The web should be more like a game!

This post was originally written in Dutch for Frankwatching.com

The World Wide Web is a dull and annoying place, especially if you consider it an interactive medium. Although search fields and hyperlinks give you access to an almost infinite amount of information and you also are able to add to that information, the web seldom becomes truly interactive.

Interaction between people is exciting and unpredictable. You immediately notice this when you talk to someone else. You tell something and the other responds. A dialog follows and what the outcome or direction of the conversation will be is unknown. Every person interprets stuff from his own intelligence and frame of reference, but websites and servers don’t have those. This is why interaction on the web is quite boring and predictable. For example, if you google on “cars” you get thousands of hits that are somewhat relevant but completely useless. But when you talk with someone about “cars”, the other person asked questions and together you come to a meaningful conversation, exchanging information in the process.

But not only searching on the web is boring, almost all interaction with a website is annoying and dull. Posting an ad on eBay, for example, a boring task that is more work than fun. And booking a plain ticket online, a task that can take up to several hours, especially if you have special demands.

A more fun web
It shouldn’t be much of a problem to make the web more interesting and entertaining with our technical skills and knowledge of interaction and usability. An algorithm can try to interpret a question instead of searching for keywords. Something that already works on sites like ABN AMRO and KLM.
A site can also try to help you with relevant suggestions and personalised content. For example, Last.FM suggest music that you probably like and Hyves suggest friends that you probably know. These things seem to go beyond amazon’s book suggestions, which seem more random and less personal.

But also smaller interactive processes can be made more fun, take the Body Mass Index calculator on the site of the Dutch Centre for Food Education. Instead of a form with 2 input fields you can play with 2 sliders which control a circle graph, this way the user gets direct feedback in a fun visual way.

Game Design
Much can be learned from games for making the web more fun. Games are designed to be entertaining and all interaction with the player is centred around this.
Visual input and direct feedback are important elements in this, often controlled by some form of artificial intelligence. The AI can interpret and process player input and give meaningful visual feedback. By means of AJAX techniques and more advanced algorithms this can also be accomplished on the web. Thus making the web more usable and fun!

Entertaining Interaction
We can make sites more fun and excessable by implementing entertaining interaction patterns. Of course interaction that is more meaningful and entertaining is good for the visitor, but also for the site owner. Because the more excessable a webshop, the more turnover it makes. And the clearer an informative website is, the more often a visitor comes back.
For web builders and their clients now lays the task to find a mix between game design, usability and artificial intelligence. And with this we can make the internet truly entertaining and interactive!