Living as we do in a capitalist society, it’s easy to assume the only reason people would engage in creative labour is for profit. But the world of culture doesn’t work that way. It’s always been full of creators who are<ol><li>astonishingly productive and</li><li>propelled by desires other than money.</li></ol>The sheer uncommerciality of the venture is weirdly refreshing. It stands in total contrast to the just-add-water hucksterism of today’s influencers and tech firms, who are constantly trying to shove sponsorships into their work or shake their audience upside down to see what loose change rattles out.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Making Something As a Gift is a Powerful Motivation

Wordle offers up only one new word everyday. That’s it. Once you’ve solved the day’s word, you…stop playing. You go do other stuff, like your job or hanging out with your loved ones. Sure, you might hanker to play more Wordle, but you can’t. You gotta wait until tomorrow.Unlike nearly all social media (and most video games), Wordle is not trying to get you narcotically addicted to reopening the app again and again, all day long, in an eye-glazed trance.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Don't Engineer For Addiction

Anyone can play Wordle, in any browser. You don’t need to create an account or log in. You don’t need an app store. Wardle avoided every single digital walled garden, and instead went with the most wide-open field available: The web.﻿People are especially enthusiastic about things they can share without having to go through an App Store, or without being bogged down by having lots of their data captured during the experience.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Make Stuff On The Open Web

It’s frequently very valuable to pay attention how your audience is interacting with your work. They see things you don’t, and come up with ideas you can’t. In the early days of Twitter, it was clever users who invented the retweet and the at-reply. To their credit, Twitter’s engineers spotted the behavior and adopted them as native features, and they helped catalyze Twitter’s explosive growth.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Observe What Your Fans Are Doing

Brooklyn-based software developer Josh Wardle created it last year as a gift for his partner, who was obsessed with word games like the New York Times’ “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee">Spelling Bee</a>”. Wardle put the game up for free online in October, and it quickly went all hockey-stick. There were <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2022/01/20/millennials-are-driving-force-behind-wordles-success-poll-suggests/?sh=70b6e76c6e72">90 people people playing it in November, 300,000 by early January, and only a few weeks later, about 2 million a week.</a> One survey estimates that 14% of American adults are playing Wordle.

The Word About Wordle

Most successful ideas do not arrive out of nowhere; they’re extensions or riffs on existing ones.This is particularly true with games, where tinkering with an existing form of play can create something that’s i) delightfully new while ii) also being familiar. That combo of “new” yet “familiar” is pure gold. Do something too derivative and people yawn; do something too novel and they’re baffled. The path to wild success is hitting that midpoint.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: No Need To Reinvent The Wheel

When we’re creating things, it’s normal to start worrying about how our audience will react. All those different people, with different aesthetics! Some of them are gonna love this part of what you’re doing, but hate this other part. Worrying about this can lead you into a rathole of self-censorship, where you try to satisfy everyone and wind up satisfying no one.Wardle was making his game for just one person. When you’re in a mental dialogue with a single person, your creative decisions are sharpened.

Six Design Lessons from the Success of Wordle: Make Things For An Audience of One

Made me play the game! It's online on the web and free to play!

Brooklyn-based software developer Josh Wardle created it last year as a gift for his partner, who was obsessed with word games like the New York Times’ “Spelling Bee”. Wardle put the game up for free…