Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/sharing-code-between-projects/

Sharing Code Between Projects: Lessons Learned In The Trenches

Sharing Code Between Projects: Lessons Learned In The Trenches

Jonathan Saring

2018-04-25T14:40:51+02:00
2018-04-25T13:20:26+00:00

About a year ago, we came to a crossroad that changed the way we build software today. Like many other teams, we were working on a few things at a time, developing different projects for our web and mobile applications, with shared ingredients in the form of common Node.js code between our back-end repositoriess and microservices, and common React UI components with some slight visual and functional differences between our apps.

As our team grew and code lines multiplied, we began to realize that with every passing day we were writing the same code over and over again. Over time, it became harder to maintain our code base and develop new features with the same speed and efficiency.

Finally, we decided to find a solution that would enable us to share and sync common components of code between our projects. Here is what we learned along our journey, which eventually gave birth to Bit.

Code components as building blocks. (Large preview)

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Common Code In The Wild

While Git is great for collaborating on a single repository, sharing code between multiple projects can be more challenging than we think.

To get started, we looked into our own code base to learn how many times we duplicated our own integration to our user service. The unbelievable result was no less than 86 instances. After the initial shock, we started thinking that this must also be happening elsewhere.

Using the same code in different places. (Large preview)

We asked some friends working in a few different organizations of various sizes to run a simple copy-and-paste detection on their code base, looking for duplicates of code longer than 100 lines. The result blew us away: On average, more than 30% of their code base was duplicated.

Finally, we decided to look deep into the open-source projects on GitHub, checking for both duplications and re-implementations of a simple isString function in the 10,000 most popular JavaScript GitHub projects.

Amazingly, we found this function was implemented in more than 100 different ways and duplicated over 1,000 times in only 10,000 repositories. Later studies claim that over 50% of the code on GitHub is actually duplicated. We realized we were not the only ones facing this issue.

Looking For A Solution

Before building Bit, we looked for a tool that would help us turn the smaller components that our apps are built from into building blocks that could be shared between our projects and synced across our code base. We also wanted to organize them and make them discoverable for our team. Here’s a short summary of what we learned.

A Micro-Package Arsenal With NPM

At first, we considered publishing all of our UI components, utility functions and smaller modules as packages to NPM. This seemed like the obvious solution for modularity for our software’s building blocks. However, we quickly learned that this solution came with huge overhead.

Trying to publish a few files from our project to NPM forced us to split our repository and create new ones just to share this code. When dealing with hundreds of components, this meant having to maintain and make changes across hundreds of repositories.

We would also have to refactor our code base, removing the newly created packages from their original repositories, boilerplating the packages in the new repositories and so on.

Even then, we had now a simple way to organize these packages and make them easily discoverable to our entire team. Another major problem was the coupling between the packages and the owners of their origin repositories, which made it nearly impossible for other people to quickly make updates to the packages while working on their own projects.

This kind of overhead was too much for us to handle. So, we quickly decided to look for a better way to share our code.

Lerna Monorepos

The next option we came up with was to use Lerna in order to refactor our code base into a few multi-package repositories, often referred to as “monorepos”.

Lerna multi-package repository. (Large preview)

The upside of this solution was that it would allow us to maintain and publish all our packages from a single repository. However, this option, too, came with a set of drawbacks, particularly when working with smaller components.

Choosing this option meant we would still have to effectively keep multiple packages with multiple package.json files, multiple build and test environments and a complicated dependency tree to handle between them. Updating these packages must also go through the main repository, still making it hard to modify these package from other projects when working with a few separate monorepos.

For example, take the popular Material-UI React UI library. Even though it uses Lerna to publish five different packages from the same repository, you would still have to install the entire library to use each of its components. Making changes would still have to go through that project as well, and discoverability for these component didn’t improve.

Monorepos can be great for some cases (such as testing or building a project as a whole) and can definitely work for some teams. However, refactoring your entire code base just to share common code between projects while still having to struggle with the issues mentioned above made us drop this option as well.

Shared Libraries

This option was quickly dropped, too. In a lot of way, it resembles using a CD-ROMs instead of an iTunes playlist. First, it made no sense to force an entire library of React components and an entire utility library and so on on each of our projects.

Secondly, every project using it would be tightly coupled to the development of this library, making it impossible to adjust its components for each project. This becomes most painful when sharing common Node.js code between our microservices, which would now be coupled to the library.

Thirdly, discoverability within the library is bound to be poor and would involve a lot of work with its documentation and usage in different edge cases.

Because it makes very little sense to couple and slow down our development, we try to minimize the use of these libraries as much as possible. Even popular JavaScript utility libraries such as Lodash are working hard to make their smaller components independently available via NPM.

Git Submodules

Finally, we turned back time and looked into working with Git submodules.

You there. You're thinking about using a Git submodule. DON'T. Just don't. It's not worth it, ever.

— Jeremy Kahn (@jeremyckahn) December 16, 2012

Git enables you to make one repository a subdirectory of another repository, creating a single working tree for the entire project, so that a repository can utilize code from another repository.

As for many other teams, this solution did not last for us. First, submodules only work on the master branch, which causes problems for rapid development. Secondly, submodules increase coupling between projects, which makes it hard to work on cross-repository assignments. Finally, a submodule repository is oblivious to its own nesting and the existence of dependent repositories.

After trying these different solutions, we realized that it shouldn’t be this complicated. There really should be a simpler way to organize, share and develop components of code from different projects. So, we decided to build it, and called it Bit.

Building Bit

Our vision for a solution was simple: turn our components and modules into building blocks that can be easily isolated from any project, organized in the cloud and used in any project.

Isolate, share and organize your reusable code. (Large preview)

When building it, we set a few guidelines for what we needed from the project.

Make it seamless to isolate and share code components from any project, without having to create new repositories or manually configure build and test environments and dependencies for each component.
Enable two-way development, so that each component could be changed and updated from any project, while changes would be synced across our code base.
Make it simple to organize and share our components, while making them discoverable for our entire team with useful visual information.

After hard work and extensive research, in 2017 we released the first version of Bit to GitHub.

How It Works

Bit’s workflow is made of three simple steps:

The first is to simply tell Bit which components of code you would like to share from your project, and it will immediately start tracking them in all of the projects you share them in.
You can then tag a version for these components so that Bit automatically defines and locks their dependency tree for both file and package dependencies, and creates an isolated environment for each component to build and test in isolation.
Finally, you can share the components to the cloud (or your own remote server), where they will be organized, will be made discoverable and can be installed with NPM or Yarn like any other package.

You don’t have to create new repositories, split your code base or refactor a single line of code.

Now comes the really cool part. You can also use Bit to import the components into other projects for further development. Because Bit tracks your components between projects, you can simultaneously develop them from different repositories and sync changes across your code base.

This fast and distributed workflow means you won’t be tied by ownership issues, and you can actually develop the shared code and update changes from any of your team’s projects.

Let’s see an example.

Example: Bit With React UI Components

A React Hero component with Bit. (Large preview)

For this example, let’s pick a common use case: syncing React UI components between apps. Although designed to be reusable, achieving such reusability can be challenging.

Let’s take an example React app on GitHub. It contains eight reusable React UI components and one global styling component. As you can see, Bit was added to the repository (see the bit.json and .bitmap files) to track these components — but not a single line of code was changed in the repository. From there, the components were shared to the corresponding scope on Bit’s free web hub.

As you can see, each of the components is now available to any developer to install with NPM or Yarn or to import into their own projects for further development.

All of the components are organized and can be shared with your team and searched for via a search engine. They are presented with visual rendering, build and test results (you can use premade external build and test environments or create your own), and come with auto-parsed docs so that you can make an informed decision on which components to use.

Once it’s changed from a different project, you can update the component’s version in the scope (which works as a remote source of truth) and sync changes between different repositories.

A short tutorial for React is available for the example project.

Conclusion

Sharing code between projects is vital to building software faster, while making your code base simpler to maintain and develop over time. As more of our applications are built using reusable components such as React and Vue UI components, Node.js modules, simple functions, GraphQL APIs and more, turning them into building blocks for different projects becomes more rewarding.

However, the overhead of splitting repositories, refactoring projects, and modifying components from different projects can make it hard to effectively collaborate and share your code. These are the lessons learned from our own journey towards simple and effective code sharing, making it simpler to share, discover and collaborate as a team while building with our common LEGO bricks.

Bit is an open-source project, so feel free to jump in, suggest feedback or ask anything. Just remember that, at the end of the day, sharing code is always about people and about growing a collaborative culture where people play together to build great things.

(rb, ra, al, yk, il)

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/XFYT2HoHg9Q/famous-logos-redesigned-as-fonts

A good logo design often depends on a good typeface. If you get it right, the perfect font choice can become synonymous with a brand. To show how a strong identity can remain recognisable even when you swap out the brand name, designer and teacher Emanuele Abrate has been conducting a series of interesting logo experiments.

In his experiments, Abrate has swapped out the names of brands like Adidas and YouTube for the names of the fonts they use. Speaking to Co. Design, he revealed that the project came about as he struggled to identify the typeface in a logo. "Every time I see a logo, I wonder how it was conceived, how it was designed, what kind of typeface was used and why."

The results will make you double-take. In most cases, our eyes have become so used to the font styles and logo graphics that we'll just glaze over when looking at a design that looks recognisable enough. Take a look at them by scrolling left to right with the arrow icons in the gallery below.

Related articles:

The rules of responsive web typography5 typography trends for 201850 top typography tutorials

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/working-together-designers-developers/

Working Together: How Designers And Developers Can Communicate To Create Better Projects

Working Together: How Designers And Developers Can Communicate To Create Better Projects

Rachel Andrew

2018-04-24T16:50:19+02:00
2018-04-24T15:30:31+00:00

Among the most popular suggestions on Smashing Magazine’s Content User Suggestions board is the need of learning more about the interaction and communication between designers and developers. There are probably several articles worth of very specific things that could be covered here, but I thought I would kick things off with a general post rounding up some experiences on the subject.

Given the wide range of skills held by the line-up at our upcoming SmashingConf Toronto — a fully live, no-slides-allowed event, I decided to solicit some feedback. I’ve wrapped those up with my own experience of 20 years working alongside designers and other developers. I hope you will add your own experiences in the comments.

Some tips work best when you can be in the same room as your team, and others are helpful for the remote worker or freelancer. What shines through all of the advice, however, is the need to respect each other, and the fact that everyone is working to try and create the best outcome for the project.

Working Remotely And Staying Connected

The nomadic lifestyle is not right for everyone, but the only way to know for sure is to try. If you can afford to take the risk, go for it. Javier Cuello shares his experience and insights from his four years of travel and work. Read article →

For many years, my own web development company operated as an outsourced web development provider for design agencies. This involved doing everything from front-end development to implementing e-commerce and custom content management solutions. Our direct client was the designer or design agency who had brought us on board to help with the development aspect of the work, however, in an ideal situation, we would be part of the team working to deliver a great end result to the end client.

Sometimes this relationship worked well. We would feel a valued part of the team, our ideas and experience would count, we would work with the designers to come up with the best solution within budgetary, time, and other constraints.

In many cases, however, no attempt was made to form a team. The design agency would throw a picture of a website as a PDF file over the fence to us, then move on to work on their next project. There was little room for collaboration, and often the designer who had created the files was busy on some other work when we came back with questions.

Getting workflow just right ain’t an easy task. So are proper estimates. Or alignment among different departments. That’s why we’ve set up ‘this-is-how-I-work’-sessions — with smart cookies sharing what works well for them. A part of the Smashing Membership, of course.

Explore features →

It was an unsatisfactory way to work for everyone. We would be frustrated because we did not have a chance to help ensure that what was designed was possible to be built in a performant and accessible way, within the time and budget agreed on. The designer of the project would be frustrated: Why were these developers asking so many questions? Can they not just build the website as I have designed? Why are the fonts not the size I wanted?

The Waterfall versus Agile argument might be raised here. The situation where a PDF is thrown over the fence is often cited as an example of how bad a Waterfall approach is. Still, working in a fully Agile way is often not possible for teams made of freelancers or separate parties doing different parts of the work. Therefore, in reading these suggestions, look at them through the lens of the projects you work on. However, try not to completely discount something as unworkable because you can’t use the full process. There are often things we can take without needing to fully adopt one methodology or another.

Setting Up A Project For Success

I came to realize that very often the success of failure of the collaboration started before we even won the project, with the way in which we proposed the working relationship. We had to explain upfront that experience had taught us that the approach of us being handed a PDF, quoting and returning a website did not give the best results.

Projects that were successful had a far more iterative approach. It might not be possible to have us work alongside the designers or in a more Agile way. However, having a number of rounds of design and development with time for feedback from each side went a long way to prevent the frustrations of a method where work was completed by each side independently.

Creating Working Relationships

Having longer-term relationships with an agency, spanning a number of projects worked well. We got to know the designers, learned how they worked, could anticipate their questions and ensure that we answered them upfront. We were able to share development knowledge, the things that made a design easier or harder to implement which would, therefore, have an impact on time and budget. They were able to communicate better with us in order to explain why a certain design element was vital, even if it was going to add complexity.

For many freelance designers and developers, and also for those people who work for a distributed company, communication can become mostly text-based. This can make it particularly hard to build relationships. There might be a lot of communication — by email, in Slack, or through messages on a project management platform such as Basecamp. However, all of these methods leave us without the visual cues we might pick up from in-person meetings. An email we see as to the point may come across to the reader as if we are angry. The quick-fire nature of tools such as Slack might leave us committing in writing something which we would not say to that person while looking into their eyes!

Freelance data scientist Nadieh Bremer will talk to us about visualizing data in Toronto. She has learned that meeting people face to face — or at least having a video call — is important. She told me:

“As a remote freelancer, I know that to interact well with my clients I really need to have a video call (stress on the video) I need to see their face and facial/body interactions and they need to see mine. For clients that I have within public transport distance, I used to travel there for a first ‘getting to know each other/see if we can do a project’ meeting, which would take loads of time. But I noticed for my clients abroad (that I can’t visit anyway) that a first client call (again, make sure it’s a video-call) works more than good enough.

It’s the perfect way to weed out the clients that need other skills that I can give, those that are looking for a cheap deal, and those where I just felt something wasn’t quite clicking or I’m not enthusiastic about the project after they’ve given me a better explanation. So these days I also ask my clients in the Netherlands, where I live, that might want to do a first meeting to have it online (and once we get on to an actual contract I can come by if it’s beneficial).”

Working In The Open

Working in the open (with the project frequently deployed to a staging server that everyone had access to see), helped to support an iterative approach to development. I found that it was important to support that live version with explanations and notes of what to look at and test and what was still half finished. If I just invited people to look at it without that information we would get lists of fixes to make to unfinished features, which is a waste of time for the person doing the reporting. However, a live staging version, plus notes in a collaboration tool such as Basecamp meant that we could deploy sections and post asking for feedback on specific things. This helped to keep everyone up to date and part of the project even if — as was often the case for designers in an agency — they had a number of other projects to work on.

There are collaboration tools to help designers to share their work too. Asking for recommendations on Twitter gave me suggestions for Zeplin, Invision, Figma, and Adobe XD. Showing work in progress to a developer can help them to catch things that might be tricky before they are signed off by the client. By sharing the goal behind a particular design feature within the team, a way forward can be devised that meets the goal without blowing the budget.

Zeplin is a collaboration tool for developers and designers

Scope Creep And Change Requests

The thing about working in the open is that people then start to have ideas (which should be a positive thing), however, most timescales and budgets are not infinite! This means you need to learn to deal with scope creep and change requests in a way that maintains a good working relationship.

We would often get requests for things that were trivial to implement with a message saying how sorry they were about this huge change and requests for incredibly time-consuming things with an assumption it would be quick. Someone who is not a specialist has no idea how long anything will take. Why should they? It is important to remember this rather than getting frustrated about the big changes that are being asked for. Have a conversation about the change, explain why it is more complex than it might appear, and try to work out whether this is a vital addition or change, or just a nice idea that someone has had.

If the change is not essential, then it may be enough to log it somewhere as a phase two request, demonstrating that it has been heard and won’t be forgotten. If the big change is still being requested, we would outline the time it would take and give options. This might mean dropping some other feature if a project has a fixed budget and tight deadline. If there was flexibility then we could outline the implications on both costs and end date.

With regard to costs and timescales, we learned early on to pad our project quotes in order that we could absorb some small changes without needing to increase costs or delay completion. This helped with the relationship between the agency and ourselves as they didn’t feel as if they were being constantly nickel and dimed. Small changes were expected as part of the process of development. I also never wrote these up in a quote as contingency, as a client would read that and think they should be able to get the project done without dipping into the contingency. I just added the time to the quote for the overall project. If the project ran smoothly and we didn’t need that time and money, then the client got a smaller bill. No one is ever unhappy about being invoiced for less than they expected!

This approach can work even for people working in-house. Adding some time to your estimates means that you can absorb small changes without needing to extend the timescales. It helps working relationships if you are someone who is able to say yes as often as possible.

This does require that you become adept at estimating timescales. This is a skill you can develop by logging your time to achieve your work, even if you don’t need to log your time for work purposes. While many of the things you design or develop will be unique, and seem impossible to estimate, by consistently logging your time you will generally find that your ballpark estimates become more accurate as you make yourself aware of how long things really take.

Respect

Aaron Draplin will be bringing tales from his career in design to Toronto, and responded with the thought that it comes down to respect for your colleague’s craft:

“It all comes down to respect for your colleague’s craft, and sort of knowing your place and precisely where you fit into the project. When working with a developer, I surrender to them in a creative way, and then, defuse whatever power play they might try to make on me by leading the charges with constructive design advice, lightning-fast email replies and generally keeping the spirit upbeat. It’s an odd offense to play. I’m not down with the adversarial stuff. I’m quick to remind them we are all in the same boat, and, who’s paying their paycheck. And that’s not me. It’s the client. I’ll forever be on their team, you know? We make the stuff for the client. Not just me. Not ‘my team’. We do it together. This simple methodology has always gone a long way for me.”

I love this, it underpins everything that this article discusses. Think back to any working relationship that has gone bad, how many of those involved you feeling as if the other person just didn’t understand your point of view or the things you believe are important? Most reasonable people understand that compromise has to be made, it is when it appears that your point of view is not considered that frustration sets in.

There are sometimes situations where a decision is being made, and your experience tells you it is going to result in a bad outcome for the project, yet you are overruled. On a few occasions, decisions were made that I believed so poor; I asked for the decision and our objection to it be put in writing, in order that we could not be held accountable for any bad outcome in future. This is not something you should feel the need to do often, however, it is quite powerful and sometimes results in the decision being reversed. An example would be of a client who keeps insisting on doing something that would cause an accessibility problem for a section of their potential audience. If explaining the issue does not help, and the client insists on continuing, ask for that decision in writing in order to document your professional advice.

Learning The Language

I recently had the chance to bring my CSS Layout Workshop not to my usual groups of front-end developers but instead to a group of UX designers. Many of the attendees were there not to improve their front-end development skills, but more to understand enough of how modern CSS Layout worked that they could have better conversations with the developers who built their designs. Many of them had also spent years being told that certain things were not possible on the web, but were realizing that the possibilities in CSS were changing through things like CSS Grid. They were learning some CSS not necessarily to become proficient in shipping it to production, but so they could share a common language with developers.

There are often debates on whether “designers should learn to code.” In reality, I think we all need to learn something of the language, skills, and priorities of the other people on our teams. As Aaron reminded us, we are all on the same team, we are making stuff together. Designers should learn something about code just as developers should also learn something of design. This gives us more of a shared language and understanding.

Seb Lee-Delisle, who will speak on the subject of Hack to the Future in Toronto, agrees:

“I have basically made a career out of being both technical and creative so I strongly feel that the more crossover the better. Obviously what I do now is wonderfully free of the constraints of client work but even so, I do think that if you can blur those edges, it’s gonna be good for you. It’s why I speak at design conferences and encourage designers to play with creative coding, and I speak at tech conferences to persuade coders to improve their visual acuity. Also with creative coding. 🙂 It’s good because not only do I get to work across both disciplines, but also I get to annoy both designers and coders in equal measure.”

I have found that introducing designers to browser DevTools (in particular the layout tools in Firefox and also to various code generators on the web) has been helpful. By being able to test ideas out without writing code, helps a designer who isn’t confident in writing code to have better conversations with their developer colleagues. Playing with tools such as gradient generators, clip-path or animation tools can also help designers see what is possible on the web today.

Animista has demos of different styles of animation

We are also seeing a number of tools that can help people create websites in a more visual way. Developers can sometimes turn their noses up about the code output of such tools, and it’s true they probably won’t be the best choice for the production code of a large project. However, they can be an excellent way for everyone to prototype ideas, without needing to write code. Those prototypes can then be turned into robust, permanent and scalable versions for production.

An important tip for developers is to refrain from commenting on the code quality of prototypes from members of the team who do not ship production code! Stick to what the prototype is showing as opposed to how it has been built.

A Practical Suggestion To Make Things Visual

Eva-Lotta Lamm will be speaking in Toronto about Sketching and perhaps unsurprisingly passed on practical tips for helping conversation by visualizing the problem to support a conversation.

Creating a shared picture of a problem or a solution is a simple but powerful tool to create understanding and make sure they everybody is talking about the same thing.

Visualizing a problem can reach from quick sketches on a whiteboard to more complex diagrams, like customer journey diagrams or service blueprints.

But even just spatially distributing words on a surface adds a valuable layer of meaning. Something as simple as arranging post-its on a whiteboard in different ways can help us to see relationships, notice patterns, find gaps and spot outliers or anomalies. If we add simple structural elements (like arrows, connectors, frames, and dividers) and some sketches into the mix, the relationships become even more obvious.

Visualising a problem creates context and builds a structural frame that future information, questions, and ideas can be added to in a ‘systematic’ way.

Visuals are great to support a conversation, especially when the conversation is ‘messy’ and several people involved.

When we visualize a conversation, we create an external memory of the content, that is visible to everybody and that can easily be referred back to. We don’t have to hold everything in our mind. This frees up space in everybody’s mind to think and talk about other things without the fear of forgetting something important. Visuals also give us something concrete to hold on to and to follow along while listening to complex or abstract information.

When we have a visual map, we can point to particular pieces of content — a simple but powerful way to make sure everybody is talking about the same thing. And when referring back to something discussed earlier, the map automatically reminds us of the context and the connections to surrounding topics.

When we sketch out a problem, a solution or an idea the way we see it (literally) changes. Every time we express a thought in a different medium, we are forced to shape it in a specific way, which allows us to observe and analyze it from different angles.

Visualising forces us to make decisions about a problem that words alone don’t. We have to decide where to place each element, decide on its shape, size, its boldness, and color. We have to decide what we sketch and what we write. All these decisions require a deeper understanding of the problem and make important questions surface fairly quickly.

All in all, supporting your collaboration by making it more visual works like a catalyst for faster and better understanding.

Working in this way is obviously easier if your team is working in the same room. For distributed teams and freelancers, there are alternatives to communicate in ways other than words, e.g. by making a quick Screencast to demonstrate an issue, or even sketching and photographing a diagram can be incredibly helpful. There are collaborative tools such as Milanote, Mural, and Niice; such tools can help with the process Eva-Lotta described even if people can’t be in the same room.

Niice helps you to collect and discuss ideas

I’m very non-visual and have had to learn how useful these other methods of communication are to the people I work with. I have been guilty on many occasions of forgetting that just because I don’t personally find something useful, it is still helpful to other people. It is certainly a good idea to change how you are trying to communicate an idea if it becomes obvious that you are talking at cross-purposes.

Over To You

As with most things, there are many ways to work together. Even for remote teams, there is a range of tools which can help break down barriers to collaborating in a more visual way. However, no tool is able to fix problems caused by a lack of respect for the work of the rest of the team. A good relationship starts with the ability for all of us to take a step back from our strongly held opinions, listen to our colleagues, and learn to compromise. We can then choose tools and workflows which help to support that understanding that we are all on the same team, all trying to do a great job, and all have important viewpoints and experience to bring to the project.

I would love to hear your own experiences working together in the same room or remotely. What has worked well — or not worked at all! Tools, techniques, and lessons learned are all welcome in the comments. If you would be keen to see tutorials about specific tools or workflows mentioned here, perhaps add a suggestion to our User Suggestions board, too.

(il)

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/04/8-ways-to-emotionally-reward-your-users/

As sometimes happens, I was thinking the other day. In this case, I was doing my thinking after finishing a long video game: Far Cry 5. It occurred to me that video game creators are the masters of emotional payoff, when everything goes right. The world of that game is in itself rewarding and fun to run around in.

It’s actually enough fun, that I’m more than willing to ignore how the game’s story was an unrewarding, steaming pile of sadness. They made this digital faux-Montana delightful enough that I don’t want to leave. At least I intend to have a few more gaming sessions there, in any case.

That’s actually kind of impressive, when you think about it. The experience has enough emotional payoff to keep me around when I absolutely despised the central narrative. Imagine if a website (Facebook) could (Twitter) do (LinkedIn?) that (Amazon). Well they can, and they do. It’s actually not great, sometimes. But hey, you can use these powers for good.

Anyway, my point is that people want payoff for the effort they put into things, and that includes the websites they browse. You might think receiving the product or service you’re selling is the payoff, and it certainly can be. But you can build emotional rewards into just about any aspect of a website or app.

Here then, are some examples of emotional rewards that can keep people coming back:

1. Connection

Well this is the big and obvious one; it’s the entire foundation for “Web 2.0”. (Remember when everyone and their dog was writing about that? Good times.) People want to connect with other people, or failing that, fuzzy animals. You can do both on just about any site with social features, these days.

The popularity of tools designed to help us engage other human beings is staggering when compared to pretty much anything else on the Internet. And now, we can connect with people who share our interests no matter the distance. For better or worse, this is our world now.

2. Popularity & Recognition

After connection, popularity is often regarded as the second best thing. Many of the same platforms that offer a chance to connect also offer us a chance to get “Internet famous”. Offering people the chance to feel recognized isn’t just an emotional reward, it’s a business model. Again, for better or worse, this is our world, now.

3. Competition

Lastly for the social section of this article, we have competition. It’s human nature: we like kicking both metaphorical and physical butt. Offering your users a friendly way to compete with each other can drive all kinds of interaction. Just be warned: social competition often turns into a simple popularity contest, and those aren’t always great for an online community.

social competition often turns into a simple popularity contest, and those aren’t always great for an online community

4. Progress

There’s a programmer’s joke that goes something like, “Programmers love video games so much because they offer a fictional world where people give you a task, and then you complete the task, and no one changes the spec.”

In a world where life itself often feels like a Sisyphean endeavor, the feeling of making progress in any way is not to be under-valued. The mere existence of progress bars as a UI element has probably saved many a device from being smashed out of frustration.

5. Achievement

Closely related to progress is achievement: the emotion you get when you actually finish something. A sense of achievement can come from completing just about any task in this hectic day and age, with so many distractions all around. Still, the emotion is made stronger by the recognition of one’s achievements.

Even offering a quick “Hurray, you did it” after completing something annoying like a long form is a nice touch. It lets your users know that you recognize the time and effort they put into their interaction with your site, and that they could have just as easily spent that time and effort elsewhere.

6. Exclusivity

Another thing people like is having things that other people don’t have. That actually doesn’t have to be as awful as it sounds.

After all, all kinds of products come with collector’s editions, exclusive branded merchandise, and so on. Exclusive rewards are, at their best, a way of showing appreciation for the people who invest the most in you, and your product. Showing appreciation in this way can score you some life-long fans.

7. Discovery

Discovery is a tricky one. There is definitely a sense of delight in discovering new and hidden (or semi-hidden) things; but as web designers, we usually want stuff to be pretty obvious. In other words, you don’t want people to have to “discover” the “buy” button. Discovery is usually implemented with things like Easter eggs in the design, semi-obscure cultural references in the copy, and other small touches.

8. Surprises

Last, but not least, who doesn’t love a pleasant surprise? You might think this is the same as “Discovery”, but no. The surprises I’m talking about here are things you don’t have to go looking for. They’re big, they’re noticeable, and they leave users feeling like they just got something extra for free.

People love getting random extra stuff for free, be it a pixel-art “badge” on their favorite streaming site, temporary access to “premium” features on an app they use every day, a free delivery from their shopping app, or what-have-you. As the artists formerly known as Blink 182 once put it:

She left me roses by the stairs
Surprises let me know she cares

And really, that’s what rewarding your users emotionally should be about: letting them know you care, and appreciate their business. I appreciate you. You’re fantastic. I lov… ahem. It’s nice to have you around.

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