Close your eyes for a moment and picture the most memorable occasion in your life. The day you graduated from college, maybe? Or, when you got your first house? Chances are whatever it was, it stands out because of friction.
You struggled through years of painfully boring classes, a tiny rental apartment, to get to where you are. Things that are easy to do are easy to forget. Don’t believe me? Try to remember the last time you blinked, or the last time you searched Google.
Unfortunately, when designing digital interfaces and experiences, our main focus is on making them frictionless. We’re so good at this, that we make our UIs forgettable, just to make them usable.
This is the point in my post when you say, “WHAT!? YOU IDIOT?! Our forms, and sign-in boxes, and navigation don’t matter. They’re just the vehicles that get our users to the memorable parts of the app” (and you’re mostly right). The problem is that the two things bleed together alot.
Take your list of Pandora stations. Pandora wants to sell you music, and they’ve worked really hard to make sure you spend as little time as possible selecting a station. You (and I) like this a lot and we don’t really browse our stations much. We just quickly select one, and minimize the Pandora tab again. So, why is this a problem? Well, Pandora’s largest revenue stream is from visual advertising. It’s really important to the success of the ads that you look at the app as often as possible.
So, why doesn’t Pandora link these two things? Make the ads interact with the play button. Slightly distort the play button to a lime shape when they’re advertising Corona, and I guaruntee the ad will be more memorable. It’s that friction, that moment of thought that makes us remember.