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The Importance of Fun and Games in Web Design

By Ben, Web Designer on 05 March 2010 | Category: Design Industry 0 comments

Everyone likes a bit of fun every now and again... right? Websites could occasionally do with a small injection of fun too, obviously in the right situation and for the right company. Optima think that injecting a little frivolity into some of the websites we design is not such a bad practice.

Over the last few web projects we’ve worked on, Optima have been asked to provide this extra slice of nice with the addition of an interactive game. So what benefits could a game provide to a the right business?

Fun: Ok lets get the most obvious out of the way, as demonstrated with the wonderful examples above… people like a little fun now and again. Injecting more interest into the site, reducing a visitors bounce rate, and therefore add a few points to your Google rating, just by keeping a users mouse away from the back button.

Publicity: Clients want traffic, it’s as simple as that, the major reason of a website is to promote a company and increase sales. It’s logical then that the more traffic you have on a site, the more revenue it’s going to generate. Obviously it has to be the correct traffic, but you get the idea.

A flash game can generate more traffic, what Optima aim for is to create a viral effect for our clients. We want people to forward the website on, creating a snowball effect and in turn more hits. Adding scoreboards helps this as people can beat their friends and return to check if their top score has been topped. All the time this is happening we are reinforcing the clients brand, and generating additional traffic to the site.

Data capture: As previously mentioned, scoreboards provide users with a great reason to come back to the site, but they also provide our clients with a fantastic way to collect addition data. For a user to submit their score, we create a form to fill out, this can simply be name and email, but it could also be anything the client wants.

How Optima achieve it: We start with the idea, for our most recent project, www.targetzero.info, we knew it had to be an eco-friendly oriented game, and ideally, instead of a reaching number of points, the player had to achieve ‘Zero Carbon’ to move onto the next level. Having the project well underway before the game stage started, we already have a very nicely illustrated vector city, complete with rotating wind turbines and traffic. To tie in with the theme, we wanted the player to generate the cities electricity. We armed them with a Target Zero pump, and an array of wind turbines to pump wind at. The rest was simple really, we created 5 levels, each with varying amounts of distractions, and increasing difficultly and finished with a top 10 scoreboard. We’ve received excellent feedback so far, and look forward to people trying to beat our top scores! To play the game visit www.targetzero.info/game/