Optimise for Fun
"Everything is boring now," a former colleague once told me. And I took that personally. At first. But their words kept itching away at me, because maybe they weren't talking about post-pandemic company culture nor the freedom of their twenties slipping away. Lately I’ve been wondering if they were getting at something much, much bigger than all that.
When you’re not in survival mode and have a sec to look around, you might see that we're digitally existing in a sea of sameness. Identical grids. Formulaically hyped collabs. Work sucks (I know) and we create cookie-cutter content that feels generated in pursuit of the same search terms (if I have to read another ‘What Trump’s X means for Y’ headline again, I’ll riot.) And shopping online - aka the easiest dopamine fix since 2006 - is a monotonous scroll through same old product pages.
Y’ll even Ibiza looks boring now. We've optimised ourselves to boredom.
Fun’s Over, Kids
How did we get here? In our productivity-maxxing pursuit of efficiency, cost-savings and growth, we squeezed the joy out of pretty much everything online. Efficient systems make total sense for engineering teams and back-end developers, but maybe it was the wrong optimisation goal for the more front-end creative world of content.
A/B testing until every potential for fresh-thinking and newness is gone and each brand comp-shopping the other until every brand looks uncanny-valley identical, or tweaking for conversion rates and vanity metrics instead of human connection or long-term emotional imprint. When you look holistically at digital experiences today, our over reliance on performance marketing oriented thinking (how can we increase that CTR by 1 percentage point?) has led us to construct a pretty efficient yet really quite soulless experience.
In optimising for efficiency, we forgot about having fun.
But we're not algorithms. We don't seek out pure joy in perfectly optimised experiences and frictionless journeys; we want discoveries, surprise, delight…dare I say it again? FUN.
“Play is the highest form of research”
- Einstein
Thankfully, there are a few brands out there optimising for fun.
We all know about Duolingo and Liquid Death sure, and I know I’ve written about them before but brands like Vacation Inc. truly chucked the optimisation playbook out the window and dove headfirst into vibes. And it’s just not celebrated enough imo. Instead of another minimalist, celeb-endorsed/”founded” skincare brand with Gen-Z lilac/brat-green branding, they built an entire universe around the nostalgic joy of a Miami summer. Their product pages read like 80s travel brochures. Sure, they’re just selling sunscreen but it feels like you might also end up with a ticket to an alternative world of tan lines, big hair and pool parties. They’re the Palace of SPF.
Another universe-building one for the books is Severance’s dedication to fleshing out Lumon Industries. Complete with Lumon’s Lexington Letter and Refiner simulation. Finally, a cultural moment that hasn’t dedicated their digital real estate to a content dumping ground of a landing page. Make it interactive, make it Fun!
When it comes to purposeful brands or those focused on circularity and sustainability bemoaning the widening intent to action gap, I have to ask: how are these products being sold? Are you serving up fun? There is no such thing as a boring product or topic just bored minds struggling to deliver on creative thinking.
Because guess what? Fun works. As frivolous as fun might seen from the perspective of ‘These Uncertain Times’ or circularity in a climate crisis, serving up fun is the essential glue to stick our fragmented communities back together and to get people interested in pushing past all that apathy.
“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible”
- David Ogilvy
The brands that optimise for fun create better experiences yes, that’s clear but they also build better businesses.
Here's why:
Emotional Connection: Fun creates memories. When was the last time you felt emotionally connected to a perfectly optimised checkout process? Go the extra mile, take a risk against best practices and dabble in being memorable for all the right reasons.
Word of Mouth: Weirdly enough, people don't share efficient experiences - they share fun ones. Sure, it happens but it’s rare that someone will actually post about a straightforward transaction, but they'll definitely tell everyone about the brand that made them cackle alone on the bus.
Long-term Loyalty: When you make people feel good, they come back. Not because your algorithms stalked them down and gaslit them to, but because they proactively want to experience that joy again.
“Fun is one of the most important - and underrated - ingredients in any successful venture.”
-Richard Branson
So how do we break free from the algorithmic life of boresville? Here are some starting points:
Question Best Practices: Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's right. Ask yourself: what would the solution to this customer problem look like if it was fun?
Create Spaces for Play: Whether it's for your product, your team, or your always-on socials, build interactive experiences where people can let their inner child wild. And don’t be judgy about it.
Trust Creatives: Give them the data they need, then let them take risks. The best ideas come as jokes. Stop adding extra review rounds.
Plan for Failure: You need to take risks to have fun. Not everyone will get the joke and that’s ok. Get up and try again (maybe with a bit more user testing first.)
Tag, You’re It!
The next time you're facing a customer-facing decision at work, try asking a different question. Instead of "How can we optimise this?" ask "How can we make this fun?"
Remember that behind every metric, every conversion rate, every KPI, there's a human being looking for a reason to feel good.
After all, when the world feels paralysed with uncertainty, maybe the most radical thing we can do is choose joy.