From Brad Woods, a messy and copiously illustrated and animated exploration of “juice,” or:

Our wet little term for constant and bountiful user feedback. A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it. A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do - tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input. It makes the player feel powerful and in control of the world, and it coaches them through the rules of the game by constantly letting them know on a per-interaction basis how they are doing.”

It’s mostly, but not exclusively videogame related, but it has some obvious tentacles reaching into the consumer and even professional UX world – at this point in Unsung’s history you all probably know I see these worlds as overlapping, hence linking to a lot of videogame interaction stuff.

Won’t be a surprise that I particularly liked the “level of juice” slider:

The whole page is messy, but that’s actually kind of great. It generously links to other things, too. I don’t agree with all the examples, but I the entire effort feels like it came from a person, and I really treasure that.

I also thought this notion was very clever:

There is a trend to juice rare events in non-game software. For example, an explosion of confetti to celebrate completing onboarding or a funny animated 404 page. Game developers do the opposite. They focus on the mundane, routine tasks. Because these are the foundation the rest of the software sits on.

(Brad Woods’s “Digital Garden” is generally worth checking out as a whole.)