Wordle UX: Sometimes a game just feels good
How can we explain something so simple yet so popular?
Every once in a generation something beautifully simple comes along and revolutionizes our lives: the paperclip, Post-its, the iPod, Wordle. Wordle? Okay, maybe that one doesn’t quite fit with the others, but by now you must be familiar with the cryptic square emojis filling your feed on every social medium. The massively popular word game went viral over the last few weeks. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Wordle is the thing of the month for January 2022. It’s even been declared as the most recent phase of the pandemic era.
Only on its 216th day, Wordle flew under the radar through most of late 2021, but by January 10 it had 2.7 million players and counting. So how do we explain the overnight success of something so… simple? The game mechanics of Wordle are not novel or unique. In fact, it’s hardly any different than Mastermind, Lingo, and combines hangman with the kind of logic puzzles we’ve all encountered at some point in our lives. And since the recent virality of Wordle, many clones have appeared to offer the same (or similar) game. There’s nothing inherently innovative about Wordle except for that intangible thing that sets so many companies and products apart from their competition: good UX. Let’s break down the UX principles that make Wordle so great.
The instructions are simple
UX writing is an often-forgotten art, but there’s a true skill and value around clear, concise, direct instructions. Among Connie Malamed’s advice for writing UI instructions, instructions should balance brevity with getting the point across.
In just 85 words, Wordle’s instructions appear to first-time visitors and tell them everything they need to know to begin playing.
Wordle does have the advantage of its similar game mechanics to other word games. There’s little risk that new players will need any additional context before they begin playing. Many products aren’t so lucky.
There’s no barrier to entry
In an era of app downloads, bloatware, logins, social media trackers, and email subscriptions, it’s refreshing to simply visit a website and immediately begin playing a game. But a completely anonymous game wouldn’t be fun either. Wordle requires only the least amount of information necessary to remember its users. As long as users play Wordle on the same device and browser each day (not a big ask when so many of us wake up with our phone in our hands), and as long as they don’t clear their browser cookies, Wordle tallies completion streaks and statistics for returning users, providing them with incentive to come back and a sense of cumulative accomplishment each day.
The animations are smooth
One thing that sets Wordle apart from many of its copycats is its interaction design. It only uses HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but when you submit an answer, the reveal is perfectly paced to match your anticipation. Once you become a daily Wordle player, you develop an emotional attachment to the yellow (right letter but wrong spot) and green (right letter and right spot) squares, as well as a dread for the gray squares (completely incorrect). When you submit a guess, the letters perform a vertical flip and show their true colors, and when you’ve found the word of the day the letters do a little synchronized jump for joy. This is all so simple, yet so aesthetically pleasing. Wordle’s creator Josh Wardle is no stranger to web design best practices, having created other viral successes with Reddit’s Button and Place social experiments. But he spared no shortcuts when designing this simple game as a side project for his partner.
If you know, you know
By now you’re probably tired of those social media posts. I think you know which ones I’m talking about.
If you’re like me, 60% of your social media feeds have been filled with this exact sequence of text and emojis (plus or minus a couple details). But for many of us, this is how we first found ourselves Googling the word “Wordle.” We scrolled past what seemed like a string of meaningless characters and squares. And then another. And another. And suddenly we had to know what “Wordle 202 3/6” meant. (For the uninitiated, that’s the name of the game, the serial number of the daily game — day 202 — and the number of attempts out of 6 it took to get the right answer.) The emoji squares that follow map to the output of the correct/incorrect/partially correct results of each guess. And if you know what you’re looking at, you understand that each one tells a story of someone’s path to the right answer.
But that’s just the thing: you have to know what you’re looking at. The sequence of words, numbers, and emojis that you can export and share to social media act as a shibboleth to separate the in-crowd from the out-crowd. To the initiated, it’s a really easy* way to parse your friends’ performance in this daily challenge we’ve all gone through together. To the uninitiated, you need to figure out what everyone else is talking about.
This is the biggest factor in explaining Wordle’s popularity. Case in point, the emoji export feature was added on December 16, just before the game took off. While most popular internet content is shareable, tweeting out something like “hey this is a pretty cool game… <link>” just isn’t as likely to generate as much engagement as that seemingly cryptic string of characters. Rather than answer all of your questions, it leaves you asking all the questions, and by then you’re committed to find out for yourself.
*Note that the export format is easy for sighted people to parse, but is notably atrocious for those using screen readers. Some people have even created tools for converting the standard Wordle output to a more screen reader-friendly output.
It’s not designed for addiction
Unlike many of the other aesthetically pleasing, dopamine-boosting apps and games that surround us, Wordle gives us strict limits. We get one word per day, refreshing at midnight local time. Once you’ve consumed your six-or-fewer guesses for the day, that’s it. You’re done until the next midnight rolls around. No infinite scrolling. No incentive to play with new words or improve your score. No freemium model to speed up your wait for the next word. It’s… refreshing.
It’s unspoiled camaraderie
Like Tiger King and sourdough bread, we measure these phases of the pandemic by the few, rare, ubiquitous and apolitical trends that come our way. Because we only get one Wordle per day, the millions of us participating in this fad share a common bond. We get extra competitive with one another when the word of the day is relatively easy, and empathize with one another when it’s tricky.
When most products go viral, they usually seek to monetize their fame. And who can blame them? Game developers need to keep lights on, rent paid, and websites hosted. But in that monetization process, costs exclude users, ads slow down the experience, and pay-to-win models corrupt the competition. Josh Wardle has stated that he has no plans to monetize the game in the future either. This little piece of ephemeral viral culture is his gift to us all.
